Purpose

Preoperative treatment planning is key to ensure successful thermal ablation of liver tumors. The planning aims to minimize the number of electrodes required for complete ablation and the damage to the surrounding tissues while satisfying multiple clinical constraints. This is a challenging multiple objective planning problem, in which the trade-off between different objectives must be considered.

Methods

We propose a novel method to solve the multiple objective planning problem, which combines the set cover-based model and Pareto optimization. The set cover-based model considers multiple clinical constraints and generates several clinically feasible treatment plans, among which the Pareto optimization is performed to find the trade-off between different objectives.

Results

We evaluated the proposed method on 20 tumors of 11 patients in two different situations used in common thermal ablation approaches: with and without the pull-back technique. Pareto optimal plans were found and verified to be clinically acceptable in all cases, which can find the trade-off between the number of electrodes and the damage to the surrounding tissues.

Conclusion

The proposed method performs well in the two different situations we considered: with or without the pull-back technique. It can generate Pareto optimal plans satisfying multiple clinical constraints. These plans consider the trade-off between different planning objectives.

中文翻译：

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肝脏肿瘤热消融的多目标规划。

目的

术前治疗计划是确保成功热消融肝脏肿瘤的关键。该规划旨在最大限度地减少完全消融所需的电极数量和对周围组织的损伤，同时满足多种临床约束。这是一个具有挑战性的多目标规划问题，其中必须考虑不同目标之间的权衡。

方法

我们提出了一种解决多目标规划问题的新方法，该方法结合了基于集合的覆盖模型和帕累托优化。基于集合的模型考虑多个临床约束并生成多个临床可行的治疗计划，其中执行帕累托优化以找到不同目标之间的权衡。

结果

我们在常见热消融方法中使用的两种不同情况下对 11 名患者的 20 个肿瘤评估了所提出的方法：使用和不使用回拉技术。帕累托最优方案被发现并验证在所有情况下都是临床可接受的，可以在电极数量和对周围组织的损伤之间找到权衡。

结论

所提出的方法在我们考虑的两种不同情况下表现良好：有或没有回拉技术。它可以生成满足多个临床约束的帕累托最优计划。这些计划考虑了不同计划目标之间的权衡。