In radiotherapy, radiation treatment planning is the process in which a team consisting of radiation oncologists, radiation therapist, medical physicists and medical dosimetrists plan the appropriate external beam radiotherapy or internal brachytherapy treatment technique for a patient with cancer.
Typically, medical imaging (i.e., computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and positron emission tomography) are used to form a virtual patient for a computer-aided design procedure. Treatment simulations are used to plan the geometric and radiological aspects of the therapy using radiation transport simulations and optimization. For intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), this process involves selecting the appropriate beam type (electron or photon), energy (e.g. 6 MeV, 12 MeV) and arrangements. For brachytherapy, involves selecting the appropriate catheter positions and source dwell times[1][2] (in HDR brachytherapy) or seeds positions (in LDR brachytherapy). The more formal optimization process is typically referred to as forward planning and inverse planning.[3][4] Plans are often assessed with the aid of dose-volume histograms, allowing the clinician to evaluate the uniformity of the dose to the diseased tissue (tumor) and sparing of healthy structures.
Today, treatment planning is almost entirely computer based using patient computed tomography (CT) data sets. Modern treatment planning systems provide tools for multimodality image matching, also known as image coregistration or fusion.
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Forward planning is a technique used in external-beam radiotherapy to produce a treatment plan. In forward planning, a treatment oncologist places beams into a radiotherapy treatment planning system which can deliver sufficient radiation to a tumour while both sparing critical organs and minimising the dose to healthy tissue. The required decisions include how many radiation beams to use, which angles each will be delivered from, whether attenuating wedges be used, and which multileaf collimator configuration will be used to shape the radiation from each beam.
Once the treatment planner has made an initial plan, the treatment planning system calculates a predicted dose to the patient. The information from a prior CT scan of the patient allows more accurate modeling of the behaviour of the radiation as it travels through the patient's tissues. Different dose prediction models are available, including pencil beam, cone beam and monte carlo simulation, with precision versus computation time being the relevant trade-off.
This type of planning is used for the majority of external-beam radiotherapy treatments, but is only sufficiently adept to handle relatively simple cases—cases in which the tumour has a simple shape and is not near any critical organs. For more sophisticated plans, inverse planning is used to create an intensity-modulated treatment plan. This is now also used as a part of PMRT planning.
Inverse planning is a technique used to design a radiotherapy treatment plan. A radiation oncologist defines a patient's critical organs and tumour and gives target doses and importance factors for each. Then, an optimisation program is run to find the treatment plan which best matches all the input criteria.
The term "inverse planning" is somewhat of a misnomer; it was devised in contrast to the manual trial-and-error process known in oncology as "forward planning". It has stuck for historical reasons. Outside of the field of oncology, this procedure would be better described as "automated planning".
HIPO (Hybrid Inverse Planning & Optimization), developed by Pi-Medical Ltd., is one algorithm.
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