Resumen de Comments on: Intensity modulated radiation therapy treatment plan optimization 1

Marina A. Epelman

• This review article is an excellent discussion of the state-of-the-art of mathematical optimization modeling in IMRT treatment plan design and delivery. Since the goals of treating the targets to a high uniform dose of radiation and entirely sparing surrounding critical organs and healthy tissue are inherently conflicting, perhaps the greatest challenges in designing and comparing treatment plans are (1) choosing performance metrics that adequately capture how well the plan achieves each of its goals, and (2) attaining a suitable trade-off between these goals and metrics. The authors first provide a survey of various evaluation criteria that can be used to assess how well the delivered dose distribution achieves the treatment goals (including a thorough and succinct discussion of biological metrics for an audience of operations researchers).

  They follow by providing a unified framework for formulating treatment planning problems as optimization models whose specific structure is determined by delivery technology, and in which the constraints and objectives are derived from the evaluation criteria above.