Optimised robust treatment plans for prostate cancer focal brachytherapy

© The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. Focal brachytherapy is a clinical procedure that can be used to treat low-risk prostate cancer with reduced side-effects compared to conventional brachytherapy. Current practice is to manually plan the placement of radioactive seeds inside the prostate to achieve a desired treatment dose. Problems with the current practice are that the manual planning is time-consuming and high doses to the urethra and rectum cause undesirable side-effects. To address this problem, we have designed an optimisation algorithm that constructs treatment plans which achieve the desired dose while minimizing dose to organs at risk. We also show that these seed plans are robust to post-operative movement of the seeds within the prostate.