Automated Treatment Planning and Non-coplanar Beam Angles in Radiotherapy

Automation of the treatment plan generation in radiotherapy showed to play a key role in patient care. It can highly improve plan quality, reduce planner influence, increase standardization and easily generate a high number of plans.
At the Erasmus MC, an automated treatment planning system has been developed, called Erasmus-iCycle. It automatically generates high-quality Pareto-optimal plans and it can also automatically define patient-specific optimal beam directions, to overcome the not trivial manual beam selections.
In this thesis, Erasmus-iCycle has been used to improve plan quality and to investigate the impact of treatment techniques and beam directions. The latter, especially with focus on the added value of the non-coplanar beam setup, compared to coplanar setup.