Robust Modality Selection in Radiotherapy

Abstract

External beam radiotherapy attempts to maximize tumor-damage while limiting toxicity on healthy tissue. Although several modalities with distinctive biological and physical properties are available, none is dominant. A mathematical formulation for optimal modality selection with uncertainty in these properties is presented. Uncertainty is incorporated via a robust approach. The problem decomposes into finitely many subproblems with analytically solvable Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions. Numerical experiments demonstrate how uncertainty affects optimal solutions even when clinical intuition is not readily available.