Minimum-support solutions for radiotherapy planning

Computer-generated plans for radiation treatment sometimes involve an unnecessarily large number of gantry angles. Such plans are time consuming and expensive to administer because each distinct angle causes a delay while the gantry is repositioned. To address this issue, we consider an optimization model that generates minimum-support solutions to the treatment planning problem – that is, solutions involving a minimum number of gantry angles. This model is a polyhedral concave program, which is solved using a successive linearization algorithm based on work by Mangasarian.