Abstract
High-dose-rate (HDR) brachytherapy is a type of radiation treatment for cancer. In this procedure, a physician guides radioactive sources through catheters that have been inserted inside or near the cancerous tumors. The goal is to provide a high radioactive dose to treat the tumor while not significantly damaging surrounding healthy tissues. HDR brachytherapy has been successfully used for treating many types of cancer, including prostate cancer [176], cervical cancer [145], and breast cancer [107].
When treating cancer using radiation, physicians desire dose distributions that conform to patient anatomy and satisfy dose prescriptions for the tumor target and nearby critical organs [106]. Using medical images of patient anatomy and estimates of tumor location, physicians prescribe radiation dose requirements for cancerous tumors and surrounding tissues. A sample slice of a CT scan used for this purpose for a prostate cancer patient case is shown in figure 7.1. The goal is then to move the radioactive source inside the catheters to generate a dose distribution that satisfies the clinical criteria as best as possible. This goal can be formulated as an optimization-based motion planning problem: how should we move the radioactive seed through the catheters such that the dose delivered to the patient minimizes the deviation from the prescribed dose?
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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Alterovitz, R., Goldberg, K. (2008). Motion Planning for Radiation Sources during High-Dose-Rate Brachytherapy. In: Motion Planning in Medicine: Optimization and Simulation Algorithms for Image-Guided Procedures. Springer Tracts in Advanced Robotics, vol 50. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69259-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-69259-1_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-69257-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-69259-1
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