Cancerous tissues are fast proliferating cells that are more sensitive to radiation compared to healthy cells. This fact provides the basis to fight against cancers using radiotherapy. One of the radiotherapy methods is Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) that uses computer-controlled accelerators to deliver radiation doses to a tumor or specific areas within the tumor. In IMRT, planning is a critical problem regarding concerns with the choice of the best setting of radiation. It has three phases of planning.This invention focuses on the second phase i.e., fluency map optimization. The motivation is that, although the entire process of fluency map optimization is based on the trade-offs between killing cancerous cells and not harming healthy cells, there is no focus on modeling these trade-offs from the angle of cooperative game theory. Therefore, we use a game theoretical approach to create a cooperative game by solely focusing on modeling the trade-offs occurring in the fluency map optimization problem.This approach can be used for computing an emission plan in IMRT and assures the deliverance of tumoricidal radiation doses to planning target volume with minimal impact on healthy organs.
The first image is anillustration of an example of the feasible set of a bargaining game with two player (|S|=2) in the payoff space.
The second image is a block diagram conceptually illustrating a design example of a hardware implementation for the method.