Abstract (100 words or less): |  | In recent years, technical advances in medical devices have led to improved delivery of radiation therapy treatment to cancer patients. These advances call for a renewed emphasis on developing sophisticated methods for designing treatment plans. In this talk, we will give an overview of the issues involved in treatment planning, and describe the use of sophisticated mathematical models and algorithms that have been demonstrated to be effective for treatment planning. External beam radiotherapy involves the use of radiation beams that traverse from a source external to the body, through healthy tissue, to access the tumor site. An advanced form of external beam radiation therapy, known as intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), allows each radiation beam to be subdivided into tiny "beamlets". This enables a high degree of variation/modulation of the intensity within each beam. Appropriate use of IMRT has the potential to lead to substantially better treatment than was previously possible. However, the high level of variation leads to challenging issues in treatment planning. We will describe large-scale mixed integer programming models for IMRT treatment planning, designed to find the "optimal" configuration of beam angles and beamlet intensities so as to deliver a necrotic dose of radiation to the tumor itself, while limiting radiation to healthy tissue. |