High-Dose-Rate Brachytherapy with Optimal Needle Placement for Prostate Cancer

Xiaodong Wu, Weiyu Xu, Jirong Yi

Abstract: A method for needle position optimization for prostate brachytherapy for use with a radiation delivery device configured to use a plurality of needles inserted into a prostate of a patient includes obtaining imagery of the prostate of the patient, generating a needle pool for prostate brachytherapy treatment of the patient based on the imagery of the prostate of the patient, and determining at a computing device an optimum prostate brachytherapy treatment plan for the patient by iteratively removing needles from the needle pool by forming and computationally solving a convex optimization problem wherein the convex optimization problem uses a quadratic dosimetric penalty function, dwell time regularization by total variation, and block sparsity regularization term.