The Determination of Optimal Treatment Plans for Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT)

Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) is an external radiation treatment method, during which the gantry of the linear accelerator (linac) may rotate on one or more arc and send radiation continuously. A multileaf collimator (MLC) is mounted in the linac head in order to shape the radiation beam. These properties make VMAT powerful in obtaining high conformal plans in terms of dose distribution. However, there is interdependency between apertures that are composed by the MLC, and this makes the VMAT planning hard. In this study, we present two mixed integer linear programming models and compare them with respect to their total solution times and quality.