Generalized Geometric Approaches for Leaf Sequencing Problems in Radiation Therapy

The 3-D static leaf sequencing (SLS) problem arises in radiation therapy for cancer treatments, aiming to deliver a prescribed radiation dose to a target tumor accurately and efficiently. The treatment time and machine delivery error are two crucial factors of a solution (i.e., a treatment plan) for the SLS problem. In this paper, we prove that the 3-D SLS problem is NP-hard, and present the first ever algorithm for the 3-D SLS problem that can determine a tradeoff between the treatment time and machine delivery error (also called the “tongue-and-groove” error in medical literature). Our new 3-D SLS algorithm with error control gives the users (e.g., physicians) the option of specifying a machine delivery error bound, and subject to the given error bound, the algorithm computes a treatment plan with the minimum treatment time. We formulate the SLS problem with error control as computing a k-weight shortest path in a directed graph and build the graph by computing g-matchings and minimum cost flows. Further, we extend our 3-D SLS algorithm to the popular radiotherapy machine models with different constraints. In our extensions, we model the SLS problems for some of the radiotherapy systems as computing a minimum g-path cover of a directed acyclic graph. We implemented our new 3-D SLS algorithm suite and conducted an extensive comparison study with commercial planning systems and well-known algorithms in medical literature. Some of our experimental results based on real medical data are presented.