Multi-target treatment planning and delivery and virtual localization for radiation therapy

Abstract

Disclosed herein are methods for patient setup and patient target region localization for the irradiation of multiple patient target regions in a single treatment session. Virtual localization is a method that can be used to register a patient target region without requiring that the patient is physically moved using the patient platform. Instead, the planned fluence is updated to reflect the current location of the patient target region by selecting a localization reference in the localization image, calculating a localization function based on the localization reference point, and calculating the delivery fluence by convolving the localization function with a shift-invariant firing filter. Mosaic multi-target localization partitions a planned fluence map for multiple patient target regions into sub-regions that can be individually localized. De-coupled multi-target localization involves generating a separate planned fluence map for each target but constraining a cumulative fluence map to ensure dosimetric goals are met.