Subject: January 16, 12:00: Treatment Planning for Image-Guided Robotic Radiosurgery

From: SMI Event Coordinators <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 1997 10:15:59 -0800 (PST)

Colloquium
                                  ----------

Title:    Treatment Planning for Image-Guided Robotic Radiosurgery

Speaker:  Rhea Tombropoulos
          Section on Medical Informatics
          Stanford University School of Medicine

Date:     January 16, 1997
Time:     12:00 PM to 1:00 PM
Location: Lee B. Lusted Library (MSOB Conference Room x275)

Abstract:

Radiosurgery is a technique in which narrow, focused beams of
radiation are used to destroy tumors.  The treatment-planning
problem in radiosurgery is to find a set of feasible beam
configurations that will destroy the tumor without harming the
surrounding healthy tissue.  Depending on the radiosurgical
system being used, solving this problem can involve searching
a very large space of possible configurations.  Furthermore,
because tumors vary in size and shape as well as in their
locations relative to critical structures, it is important to
have an treatment-planning algorithm that is general enough to
be applicable to a wide range of tumor types.  In this talk,
I will present a general algorithm for beam selection that I
have developed for use with the Cyberknife radiosurgical system. 
My algorithm first narrows down the search space by defining a
set of promising beam configurations, and then iteratively
refines this initial set to produce a satisfactory solution.
I have evaluated this algorithm on numerous test cases, including
tumors in the brain, spine, and prostate, as well as synthetically
constructed data sets.  I will present the results of my evaluation,
and discuss directions for future research.

The schedule for all future talks sponsored by the Section on Medical
Informatics may be found on the World Wide Web at URL
http://www-smi.stanford.edu/events/.