Neuro-Dynamic Programming for Radiation Treatment Planning

In many cases a radiotherapy treatment is delivered as a series of smaller dosages over a period of time. Currently, it is difficult to determine the actual dose that has been delivered at each stage, precluding the use of adaptive treatment plans. However, new generations of machines will give more accurate information of actual dose delivered, allowing a planner to compensate for errors in delivery. We formulate a model of the day-to-day planning problem as a stochastic linear program and exhibit the gains that can be achieved by incorporating uncertainty about errors during treatment into the planning process. Due to size and time restrictions, the model becomes intractable for realistic instances. We show how neuro-dynamic programming can be used to approximate the stochastic solution, and derive results from our models for realistic time periods. These results allow us to generate practical rules of thumb that can be immediately implemented in current planning technologies.\ud \ud This material is based on research partially supported by the National Science Foundation Grants ACI-0113051 and CCR-9972372, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research Grant F49620-01-1-0040, Microsoft Corporation and the Guggenheim Foundation

Steiner Trees Over Generalized Checkerboards

To minimize the length of a planar network, we can build a Steiner minimal tree that is, a tree consisting of the original network points, as well as additional, strategically-placed (Steiner) points. Chung, Gardner and Graham [2] investigated building Steiner trees over grids of unit squares. We generalize their ideas to grids of rhombuses, and show that two near-optimal Steiner trees exist for each grid, one built from Steiner trees over rhombuses and one built from Steiner trees over isosceles triangles. Further, we conjecture that for grids with an odd number of layers, only the small angle of the rhombus drives which tree is shorter; for grids with an even number of layers, the small angle is the most important factor in determining which scheme to use