Efficient, effective, and insightful tackling of the high-dose-rate brachytherapy treatment planning problem for prostate cancer using evolutionary multi-objective Optimization Algorithms

Ngoc Hoang Luong, Anton Bouter, Marjolein C. Van Der Meer, Yury Niatsetski, Cees Witteveen, Arjan Bel, Tanja Alderliesten, Peter A.N. Bosman

Research output: Chapter in Book/Conference proceedings/Edited volumeConference contributionScientificpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

We address the problemof high-dose-rate brachytherapy treatment planning for prostate cancer. The problem involves determining a treatment plan consisting of the so-called dwell times that a radiation source resides at different positions inside the patient such that the prostate volume and the seminal vesicles are covered by the prescribed radiation dose level as much as possiblewhile the organs at risk, e.g., bladder, rectum, and urethra, are irradiated as little as possible. The problem is highly constrained, following clinical requirements for radiation dose distributionwhile the planning process for treatment planners to design a clinically-Acceptable treatment plan is strictly time-limited. In this paper, we propose that the problem can be formulated as a bi-objective optimization problem that intuitively describes trade-offs between target volumes to be radiated and organs to be spared. We solve this problem with the recently-introduced Multi-Objective Real-Valued Genepool Optimal Mixing Evolutionary Algorithm (MO-RV-GOMEA), which is a promising MOEA that is able to effectively exploit dependencies between problem variables to tackle complicated problems in the continuous domain. MO-RV-GOMEA also has the capability to perform partial evaluations if problem structures allow local variations in existing solutions to be efficiently computed, substantially accelerating the overall optimization performance. Experiments on real medical data and comparison with state-of-Theart MOEAs confirm our claims.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationGECCO 2017 - Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Pages1372-1379
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9781450349390
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 15 Jul 2017
EventGECCO 2017: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference - Berlin, Germany
Duration: 15 Jul 201719 Jul 2017
http://gecco-2017.sigevo.org/index.html/HomePage

Conference

ConferenceGECCO 2017
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityBerlin
Period15/07/1719/07/17
OtherA Recombination of the 26th International Conference on Genetic Algorithms (ICGA) and the 22nd Annual Genetic Programming Conference (GP).
Internet address

Keywords

  • Brachytherapy
  • Cancer treatment planning
  • Linkage learning
  • Multi-objective optimization
  • Partial evaluation
  • Radiotherapy

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