Application of Simulated Annealing Method for Dose Optimization

Program Using Common Lisp Programming Language

Praba Fitra Perdana, Freddy Haryanto
Department of Physics, Institut Teknologi Bandung, Indonesia

Email : praba.fitra@gmail.com

Introduction
Cancer is one of the most deadly diseases in the world. One of the most
used treatment choices to treat cancer is radiotherapy. In EBRT case, as
one of the two methods in delivering in radiotherapy, a planning is needed
before treating the cancer. One of the planning methods is inverse
planning, which is more sophisticated than the other (forward planning).
In inverse planning, an optimization is done to obtain the desired result,
which is the beam fluence distribution.
A planning can be done using software called Radiotherapy Treatment
Planning System (RTPS). One of the RTPS that can be used for forward
planning is Prism RTPS. Prism RTPS is distributed in the form of open
source software, that means it can be modified to be able to do inverse
planning to with some modifications and the code is written in Common
Lisp programming language.

Figure 2. The resulting dose distribution from the

optimization with 5000 numbers of iteration with 180
seconds in run time.

Objective
To make a dose optimization program using Common Lisp programming
language and analyze its performance in optimizing dose distribution .

Methods
The research consisted of two phase, the first phase was to test the
translated program from reference[1] (MATLAB) on simple mathematic
function to see the performance of the program in finding global optimum
and the Common Lisp programming language itself with comparing to the
reference program. The second was to test the program in dose
distribution optimization. The simulation and computation were done in
two dimension.
Figure 3. The resulting beam fluence distribution from the
optimization.

It could be seen visually from figure 2 that the dose conformed

enough to the prescribed dose in horizontal axis. The increase of
numbers of iteration will give more conformed result but
compensated by longer run time.
The dose was resulted from one time delivering only from one angle
and one layer of fluence.
Figure 1. The observed geometry used in this research.

In figure 1, the geometry observed in this research is presented. It consists

of a square with side length of 5 cm and a smaller square in the center of
the inside of the larger square, which is a square with 2 cm in side length.
The whole area is divided into 50x50 grid. From figure 1, the beam come
from the side.
The area inside the smaller square is to be delivered with dose twice
larger the dose in the outside area (inside the larger square). And that is
the defined prescribed dose for the optimization program to run.

In actual treatment planning or simulation, the excessive dose

(hotspot) outside the smaller square and the lack of dose (coldspot)
inside the smaller square could be compensated by exposure time
and fields from other angle.
The excessive dose outside the small square area is resulted from
the physics phenomenon known as depth dose curve.
In figure 3, the resulting beam distribution is presented. The rugged
curve is caused by the lack of number of beamlet in the beam field.

Conclusions

The beam is 5 cm in length, which divided into 50 beamlets.

Common Lisp language can be used quite well for optimization

program.

Dose calculation used in the optimization was pencil beam method [2].
The pencil beam method requires beam kernel for the calculation. And the
kernel in this research was obtained from EGSnrc Monte Carlo software
simulation.

The resulting dose distribution was quite well conformed to the

predefined prescribed dose visually. It means that the program
preformed quite well to optimize the dose.

Cost function used in this optimization is calculating the squared

difference between the current best dose and the prescribed dose, then
averaged [3].

Results and Discussion

The translated program (Common Lisp) was 4 6 times faster than the
reference program (MATLAB) because of different in the implementation
used.
With more complex function means more iteration numbers needed to
give more accurate result.

References
1.
2.
3.

Corte, H. Simulated Annealing Optimization. 2011 [cited 2015 August 20].

Mayles, P., et al., Handbook of Radiotherapy Physics: Theory and Practice. 2007: Taylor and Francis.
Sun, J., Implementation of 2-Step Intensity Modulated Arc Therapy, in Department of Physics and Astronomy. 2010, University of Canterbury.