Treatment Planning in Radiosurgery

Project Description

The term radiosurgery refers to very focussed delivery of ionizing radiation in order to treat a target region while sparing surrounding tissue. With the robotic CyberKnife system (Accuray Inc.) a large number of non-coplanar, non-isocentric beams can be generated. While the systems allows for excellent conformality and flexible treatments, the planning problem is challenging. We study various methods to further improve treatment plan optimization.

Interactive treatment planning for radiosurgery

We investigate treatment planning methods, in which the human planner actively interacts with a virtual three-dimensional scene to locally affect the planning outcome, by manipulating the isodose surfaces.

Robotic radiosurgery is characterized by a large number of beams delivered by a robot mounted linear accellerator. While the fexibility in beam delivery allows for very tumor conformal dose distributions it is challenging during treatment planning, where a large optimization problem needs to be solve. We develop efficient beam generation approaches considering the patient geometry and the planning objectives.

4D and 5D planning for radiation therapy

While active beam motion can be used to compensate for the most severe artifacts of organ motion, changes in the target shape or in the motion pattern need to be addressed by adaptive planning methods. 4D planning refers to pre-fraction adaptation to the prevalent motion pattern, and 5D planning to intra-fraction adaptation.

Publications

2011

Tiberiu Viulet, Norman Rzezovski, and Alexander Schlaefer,
Three-Dimensional Isodose Surface Manipulation for Multi-Criteria Inverse Planning in Radiosurgery, 2011.
Tiberiu Viulet, Norman Rzezovski, and Alexander Schlaefer,
Towards interactive planning for radiotherapy by three-dimensional iso-dose manipulation, 2011.

2007

Alexander Schlaefer, Oliver Blanck, and Achim Schweikard,
Interactive Multi-criteria Inverse Planning for Robotic Radiosurgery, Toronto, Canada, , 2007.
Alexander Schlaefer, O. Jungmann, Warren Kilby, and Achim Schweikard,
Objective specific beam generation for image guide robotic radiosurgery, Berlin , 2007.

2006

Oliver Blanck, Alexander Schlaefer, and Achim Schweikard,
3D visualization of radiosurgical treatment plans - experience with Java3D and VTK, Taylor & Francis Group, 2006. pp. 101-106.
ISBN:978-0415-43349-5
Pantaleo Romanelli, Achim Schweikard, Alexander Schlaefer, and John R. Adler Jr.,
Computer aided robotic radiosurgery, Computer Aided Surgery , vol. 11, no. 4, pp. 161-174, 2006.
DOI:10.1080/10929080600886393
File: 10929080600886393

1995

Achim Schweikard, Rhea Tombropoulos, and John R. Adler Jr.,
Robotic Radiosurgery with Beams of Adaptable Shapes, Ayache, Nicholas, Eds. Nice, France: Springer, 1995. pp. 138-149.