Treatment Planning

Overview
In radiotherapy, Treatment Planning is the process in which a team consisting of radiation oncologists, medical radiation physicists and dosimetrists plan the appropriate external beam radiotherapy treatment technique for a patient with cancer. Typically, medical imaging (i.e., computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging, and positron emission tomography) are used to form a virtual patient for a computer-aided design procedure. Treatment simulations are used to plan the geometric and radiological aspects of the therapy using radiation transport simulations and optimization. This process involves selecting the appropriate beam type (electron or photon), energy (e.g. 6MV, 12MeV) and arrangements. The more formal optimization process is typically referred to as forward planning and inverse planning in reference to intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT).

Today, treatment planning is almost entirely computer based using patient computed tomography (CT) data sets.