Genetic Algorithm Applied to Radiotherapy Treatment Planning

Conformal therapy attempts to produce accurate medical treatment that will produce a uniform dose over cancerous regions whilst at the same time sparing healthy tissues, especially the organs at risk. The constrained optimisation problem, that consists of working back from a given dose specification to elemental beam weight intensities is referred as the so called inverse problem. Due to the nature of the problem and in particular to its conflicting objectives, it is believed that heuristic techniques may have advantages over direct methods to solve for the beam intensities.