Specification and verification of radiation therapy system with respiratory compensation using Uppaal

The goal of radiation therapy is to give as much dose as possible to the target volume of tissue and avoid giving any dose to a healthy tissue. Advances of the digital control allow performing accurate plans and treatments. Unfortunately, motion compensation during the treatment remains a considerable problem. Currently, a combination of the different techniques, such as gating (restricting movement of patient) and periodic emission are used to avoid damaging healthy tissue. This paper focuses on systems that completely compensate respiratory movement (up to certain limit) and start by investigating adequacy of the existing hardware and software platform. In this paper a radiation therapy system consisting of a HexaPOD couch with 6-degrees movement, a tracking camera, a marker (markers) and a controller is modeled. A formal un-timed model was evaluated and found to be insufficient to completely determine adequacy of the system to compensate respiratory motion. Therefore, un-timed model was extended to include time and investigated. It provides more information than un-timed model, but does not answer all interesting question. Therefore, based on the results further research directions are sketched