LSH Seminar Marjolein van der Meer

Speaker:    Marjolein van der Meer

Title: Better and Faster Catheter Position Optimization in HDR Brachytherapy for Prostate Cancer using Multi-Objective Real-Valued GOMEA

Abstract: The recently-introduced Gene-pool Optimal Mixing Evolutionary Algorithm (GOMEA) family has been shown to be capable of excellent performance on academic benchmark problems, especially when efficient partial evaluations are possible. This holds true also for the latest extension, the Multi-Objective Real-Valued GOMEA (MO-RV-GOMEA). We apply MO-RV-GOMEA to the real-world multi-objective optimization problem of catheter placement in High-Dose-Rate (HDR) brachytherapy for prostate cancer. Due to the underlying geometric structure of the variables, partial evaluations can be performed, allowing MO-RV-GOMEA to exploit this structure. The performance of MO-RV-GOMEA is tested on three real-world patient cases and is shown to be superior to a state-of-the-art mixed-integer evolutionary algorithm which was recently applied to this problem. Moreover, new insights on the objectives used for prostate brachytherapy treatment planning are obtained.