4D Treatment Planning Implementations for TRiP98

TRiP98 is a treatment planning program for heavy ion radiotherapy[1] with a scanned ion beam and was developed at GSI[2]. It has been successfully used in clinical routine from 1997-2008 for over 400 patients, predominantly with head and neck tumors[3]. The treatment of mobile tumors, such as lung tumors, with a scanned ion beam poses additional challenges, resulting into a higher complexity of the treatment planning process[4]. In order to meet these additional requirements, new implementations for 4D treatment planning in TRiP98 were necessary and were first carried out by Bert et al.[4] However a large part of the treatment planning was done using the 3D functionality of TRiP98 in a combination with external software. To overcome the drawbacks of this solution new efforts are being made to extend TRiP98 for true 4D treatment planning in a fully integrated and flexible way. The status of these implementations is presented.