"Evaluating the Quality of Radiotherapy Treatment Plans for Prostate Cancer" -- talk by Professor Matthias Ehrgott (Lancaster University) Event
For more information regarding this event, please email Stephan Onggo at B.S.S.Onggo@southampton.ac.uk .
Event details
External beam radiation therapy is a common treatment method for cancer. Radiotherapy is planned with the aim to achieve conflicting goals: while a sufficiently high dose of radiation is necessary for tumour control, a low dose of radiation is desirable to avoid complications in normal, healthy, tissue. These goals are encoded in clinical protocols and a plan that does not meet the criteria set out in the protocol may have to be re-optimised using a trial and error process. To support the planning process, it is therefore important to evaluate the quality of treatment plans in order to recognise plans that will benefit from such re-optimisation and distinguish them from those for which this is unlikely to be the case. In this talk we present a case study of evaluating the quality of prostate cancer treatment plans based on data collected from Rosemere Cancer Centre at the Royal Preston Hospital in the UK. We use Principal Component Analysis to select the most relevant data. We then apply Data Envelopment Analysis to assess the quality of individual plans. Each plan is compared against the entire set of plans to identify those that could realistically be improved. We further enhance this procedure with simulation techniques to account for uncertainties in the data for treatment plans. The proposed approach to plan evaluation provides a tool to support radiotherapy treatment planners in their task to determine the best possible radiotherapy treatment for an individual cancer patient.
This is a joint work with:
Emma Stubington, Lancaster University, United Kingdom
Omid Nohadani, Northwestern University, United States
Glyn Shentall, Royal Prestom Hospital, United Kingdom
Speaker information
Professor Matthias Ehrgott, Lancaster University, Matthias Ehrgott studied Mathematics, Economics and Computer Science at the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany where he obtained Masters (1992), PhD (1997) and Habilitation (2001) degrees. In 2000, he moved to the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, as a lecturer and became full Professor and Head of Department in 2011. Since 2013, he works at Lancaster University Management School. He served as Head of the Management Science Department from 2014-2017. Matthias’ research interest is in multi-objective optimisation, which he applies in a variety of areas such as medicine, transportation, and manufacturing. He has published about 100 journal papers, book chapters and proceedings contributions on theory, methodology, and applications of multi-objective optimisation. In addition, he has authored and edited about 30 books, proceedings volumes and special issues of journals on the topic. The book “Multicriteria Optimization” (Springer, 2005) is a standard monograph in the field. In total, his work has been cited more than 14,000 times (Google Scholar). He serves on the editorial board of several journals including Computers & OR and Journal of Global Optimization. Since 2002, he has been on the Executive Committee of the International Society on Multiple Criteria Decision Making, where he is president for the period 2019-2023. In 2011, he received the Edgeworth-Pareto award of that society. He organized the 19th International Conference on MCDM in 2008 and was on the programme committee of many other international conferences, including several MOPGP and MCDM meetings.