Optimal Treatment Planning in Radiotherapy based on Boltzmann Transport Equations

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Martin Frank; Professor Dr. Michael Herty
• Subject Area: Mathematics
• Term: from 2009 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 130542091

We plan to investigate optimal control problems used in clinical external beam radiotherapy. The starting point is the formulation of the treatment planning problem as an optimal control problem for the Boltzmann Continuous Slowing Down model. Mathematically, the model consists of an integro–partial differential equation in energy, spatial and angular variables. Besides analytical investigations on existence and regularity of solutions and optimal controls we study moment approximations to the high–dimensional phase space in order to devise efficient numerical schemes. The relation between optimization and moment approximation will also be investigated. We use the analytical and numerical results on real CT−patient data and compare the optimal treatment plans obtain by solving the control problem with standard Monte–Carlo methods.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1253: Optimisation with Partial Differential Equations