A study of intravascular brachytherapy treatment planning in peripheral arteries.

A two-step method to determine the seed parameters for the planning of peripheral intravascular brachytherapy, which took the actual vessel geometry into consideration, was developed. Firstly, the characteristics of the vessel geometry was obtained by using active navigation; Then a method combined genetic algorithm with BFGS algorithm was applied to optimize the number of seeds, and the parameters associated with each seed such as the position, and the dwell time. Application of the method to a phantom model and three animal models of stenosis shows that promising result could be obtained, and the planning of peripheral intravascular brachytherapy should take actual vessel geometry into consideration.