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CP and IP approaches to cancer radiotherapy delivery optimization

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Abstract

We consider the problem of decomposing an integer matrix into a positively weighted sum of binary matrices that have the consecutive-ones property. This problem is well-known and of practical relevance. It has an important application in cancer radiation therapy treatment planning: the sequencing of multileaf collimators to deliver a given radiation intensity matrix, representing (a component of) the treatment plan. Two criteria characterise the efficacy of a decomposition: the beam-on time (the length of time the radiation source is switched on during the treatment), and the cardinality (the number of machine set-ups required to deliver the planned treatment). Minimising the former is known to be easy. However finding a decomposition of minimal cardinality is NP-hard. Progress so far has largely been restricted to heuristic algorithms, mostly using linear programming, integer programming and combinatorial enumerative methods as the solving approaches. We present a novel model, with corresponding constraint programming and integer programming formulations. We compare these computationally with previous formulations, and we show that constraint programming performs very well by comparison.

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Baatar, D., Boland, N., Brand, S. et al. CP and IP approaches to cancer radiotherapy delivery optimization. Constraints 16, 173–194 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10601-010-9104-1

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