When planning a therapy, different competing quality criteria like prospects of treatment success, risk of side effects and costs have to be considered. Thereby, chances and risks must be individually balanced for every patient. Using a real-time decision support tool the most appropriate treatment for a patient can be interactively selected from them.
Radiotherapy and especially intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) is a treatment form customized to the individual patient. Therapy planning aims for a good compromise between tumor control with sufficiently high doses and avoidance of complications by sparing the healthy tissue. In the planning process, the clinician searches for the compromise that best suits the patient.