Resumen de Comments on: Intensity modulated radiation therapy treatment plan optimization 4

Ronald Rardin

• This paper provides a thorough review of the modeling alternatives that have evolved in the recently active Operations Research field of optimizing radiation therapy planning for cancer treatment. That task, which has enormous social significance, presents itself as a natural optimization challenge because the goal is to direct high enough dose to target areas to kill tumors while conforming to constraints on dose to the surrounding organs-at-risk in order to avoid complications. This is accomplished by directing beams from a variety of angles around the patient, and in the newer Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT), by subdividing beams into a grid of virtual beamlets to more precisely shape the profile of where dose is delivered. Especially in the IMRT case, this makes corresponding optimization models quite large scale.