Abstract

: Stereotactic radiosurgery is a minimally invasive procedure that uses a focused beam of radiation as an ablative instrument to destroy brain tumors. To deposit a high dose of radiation in a tumor, while reducing the dose to healthy tissue, a large number of beams are crossfired at the tumor from multiple directions. The treatment planning problem (also called the inverse dosimetry problem) is to compute a set of beams that produces a desired dose distribution. So far, its investigation has focused on the generation of isocenter-based treatments in which the beam axes intersect at a common point, the isocenter. However, this restriction limits the applicability of the treatments to tumors having simple shapes. This paper describes carabeamer, a new treatment planner for a radiosurgical system in which the radiation source can be arbitrarily positioned and oriented by a six-degree-of-freedom manipulator. This planner uses randomized techniques to guess a promising initial set of beams....

Citations