Program Information
Quantum Annealing Applied to IMRT Beamlet Intensity Optimization
D Nazareth1*, J Spaans2 , (1) Roswell Park Cancer Institute, Buffalo, NY, (2) ,Hawarden, IA
Presentations
SU-F-BRD-13 Sunday 4:00PM - 6:00PM Room: Ballroom DPurpose: We report on the first application of quantum annealing (QA) to the process of beamlet intensity optimization for IMRT. QA is a new technology, which employs novel hardware and software techniques to address various discrete optimization problems in many fields.
Methods: We apply the D-Wave Inc. proprietary hardware, which natively exploits quantum mechanical effects for improved optimization. The new QA algorithm, running on this hardware, is most similar to simulated annealing, but relies on natural processes to directly minimize the free energy of a system. A simple quantum system is slowly evolved into a classical system, representing the objective function.
To apply QA to IMRT-type optimization, two prostate cases were considered. A reduced number of beamlets were employed, due to the current QA hardware limitation of ~500 binary variables. The beamlet dose matrices were computed using CERR, and an objective function was defined based on typical clinical constraints, including dose-volume objectives. The objective function was discretized, and the QA method was compared to two standard optimization methods: simulated annealing and Tabu search, run on a conventional computing cluster.
Results: Based on several runs, the average final objective function value achieved by the QA was 16.9 for the first patient, compared with 10.0 for Tabu and 6.7 for the SA. For the second patient, the values were 70.7 for the QA, 120.0 for Tabu, and 22.9 for the SA. The QA algorithm required 27-38% of the time required by the other two methods.
Conclusion: In terms of objective function value, the QA performance was similar to Tabu but less effective than the SA. However, its speed was 3-4 times faster than the other two methods. This initial experiment suggests that QA-based heuristics may offer significant speedup over conventional clinical optimization methods, as quantum annealing hardware scales to larger sizes.
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