Optimization Problems in Radiotherapy for Hypoxic Tumors

This book highlights the mathematical aspects of treatment outcomes analysis and dose optimization in radiotherapy for heterogeneous hypoxic tumors.  Hypoxia is a major factor of cancer resistance to radiotherapy treatment and is present in most tumors encountered in humans. The author tried to present a systematic consideration of radiotherapy for hypoxic tumors, but the emphasis was put on mathematical content of the problems. The book contains new approaches to the concepts of tumor control probability, equivalent uniform dose and radiotherapy dose optimization for hypoxic tumors developed by the author. Significant attention in this book is paid to comparison of models with measured and clinical data; therefore, the reduction of model parameters to overcome overfitting (model parsimony) was followed as much as possible.

Introduction.- Tumor Models for Optimization of Radiotherapy Response.- Dose-Volume Effects in Tumor Control Probability.- Equivalent Uniform Aerobic Dose.- Dose Nonuniformity Effectiveness  in Hypoxic Tumors.- Stability of Inverse Planning with Different Objective Functions.

Dr. Alexei Chvetsov is an Associate Professor of Clinical Medical Physics in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. Dr. Chvetsov received his Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute in 1992 and completed training in radiotherapy physics at the Tom Baker Cancer Center in Canada. He is certified by the Canadian College of Physicists in Medicine since 2003 and the American Board of Radiology since 2004.  His research interests include treatment response assessment, modeling and optimization of radiotherapy outcomes, inverse treatment planning and computational particle transport methods. Dr. Chvetsov is a member of Task and Work groups of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine. He also has been an Associate Editor of Medical Physics since 2011 and is currently a member of the Board of Associate Editors.