Automated radiotherapy treatment planning using fuzzy inference systems

Abstract

Radiotherapy is one of the treatments available for cancer patients, aiming to irradiate the tumor while preserving healthy structures. The planning of a treatment is a lengthy trial and error procedure, where treatment parameters are iteratively changed and the delivered dose is calculated to see whether it complies with the desired medical prescription. In this paper, a procedure based on fuzzy inference systems (FIS) for automated treatment planning is developed, allowing the calculation of high quality treatment plans without requiring human intervention. The procedure is structured in two different phases, incorporating the automatic selection of the best set of equidistant beam irradiation directions by an enumeration procedure. The developed method is extensively tested using ten head-and-neck cancer cases.