Purpose: To investigate the variation in computed dose-volume (DV) indices for high-dose-rate (HDR) prostate brachytherapy that can result from typical differences in computation settings in treatment planning systems (TPSs). Methods: Five factors were taken into account: number of dose-calculation points, radioactive source description, interpolation between delineated contours, intersections between delineated organ contours, and organ shape at the top and bottom contour using either full or partial slice thickness. Using in-house developed software, the DV indices of the treatment plans of 26 patients were calculated with different settings, and compared to a baseline setting that closely followed the default settings of the TPS used in our medical center. Studied organs were prostate and seminal vesicles, denoted as targets, and bladder, rectum, and urethra, denoted as organs at risk (OARs), which were delineated on MRI scans with a 3.3 mm slice thickness. Results: When sampling a fixed number of points in each organ, in order to achieve a width of the 95% confidence interval over all patients of the DV indices of 1% or less, only 32,000 points had to be sampled per target, but 256,000 points had to be sampled per OAR. For the remaining factors, DV indices changed up to 0.4% for rectum, 1.3% for urethra, and 2.6% for prostate. DV indices of the bladder changed especially if the high-dose-region was (partly) located at the most caudal contour, up to 8.5%, and DV indices of the vesicles changed especially if there were few delineated contours, up to 9.8%, both due to the use of full slice thickness for the top and bottom contour. Conclusions: The values of DV indices used in prostate HDR brachytherapy treatment planning are influenced by the computation settings in a TPS, especially at the most caudal part of the bladder, as well as in the seminal vesicles. ... Read more

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. ... Read more