The heart failure epidemic, accelerated by global ageing, is a rampant contributor to worldwide morbidity and mortality, underscoring the escalating burden of non-communicable diseases. In the context of a growing prevalence in ischaemic heart disease, advances in the acute management of myocardial infarction with rapid percutaneous revascularization have reduced prematuredeath but have resulte...

A well-studied problem in intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) is the representation of a given intensity matrix, i.e. a matrix of nonnegative integers, as a nonnegative linear combination of special 0-1-matrices, called segments. These segments can be practically realized by multileaf collimators (MLC). One important aim is the minimization of the sum of the coefficients of the linear ...

Treatment planning for particle therapy is currently an active field of research due uncertainty in how to modify physical dose in order to create a uniform biological dose response in the target. A novel treatment plan optimization strategy based on measurable nanodosimetric quantities rather than biophysical models is proposed in this work. Simplified proton and carbon treatment plans were si...

In the context of patient care for life-threatening illnesses, the presence of uncertainty may compromise the quality of a treatment. In this thesis, we investigate robust approaches to managing uncertainty in radiation therapy treatments for cancer. In the first part of the thesis, we study the effect of breathing motion uncertainty on intensity-modulated radiation therapy treatments of a lung...

OBJECTIVE The goal of this study is to demonstrate an alternative procedure to perform topical photodynamic therapy (PDT). Here, we propose the combined use of negative pressure and a 5-Aminolevulinic acid (5-ALA) cream occlusion to increase protoporphyrin IX (PPIX) formation. BACKGROUND DATA PDT using topical 5-ALA as a prodrug and precursor of PPIX has been used in the treatment and diagnos...

Optimization of cardiac resynchronization therapy is increasingly performed. Numerous methods have been proposed, many being echocardiographic. Both the technique and the timing of optimization are contentious. Whether acute haemodynamic benefits translate into long-term improvements in remodelling, symptoms, or prognosis is unknown. Recent guidelines from the American Society of Echocardiograp...

BACKGROUND We provide common datasets (which we call the CORT dataset: common optimization for radiation therapy) that researchers can use when developing and contrasting radiation treatment planning optimization algorithms. The datasets allow researchers to make one-to-one comparisons of algorithms in order to solve various instances of the radiation therapy treatment planning problem in inten...

3 ABSTRACT Biological treatment optimization aim at improving radiation therapy by accounting for the radiobiological tumour and normal tissues response properties when optimizing the dose delivery. Generally traditional methods, using only dosimetrical measures, disregard the non-linear radiation response of different tumours and normal tissues. The accumulated knowledge on tissue response to ...

Complex external beam radiation therapy treatment plans are susceptible to errors. Robust optimization methods that take uncertainties into account during the optimization can alleviate the effects of the errors. For many robust methods, the possible error realizations are discretized into scenarios. The methods then aim at achieving high quality plans in all scenarios simultaneously. The choic...