Mathematical modelling of HDR/PDR brachytherapy treatment planning problems

Brachytherapy is a medical treatment process, based on the use of radioactive sources, which are placed within the patient’s body, in order to submit a curative radiation dose to a target volume. Brachytherapy is mainly used for treating certain kinds of cancerous tumours. It can be considered as an alternative to surgery, and can be used for treating localized tumours. We dress a list of computational problems that can be set for in the domain of brachytherapy optimization, then we discuss of the existing models in the literature, and talk about a first approach, that deals with vector placement optimization, with the use of a continuous tabu search technique. We then describe a linear programming model for dose delivery optimization on two-dimensional cases.