Distributed Evolutionary Design of High Intensity Focused Ultrasound Treatment Plans

High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) is a modern and still evolving technique used to treat a variety of solid malignant cells in a well-defined volume including breast, liver, pancreas, prostate or uterine broids or other general soft-tissue sarcomas. HIFU treatments allow a noninvasive and non-ionising approach when compared to more conventional cancer treatments, such as radio and chemo-therapy or open surgery, which can lead to a multitude of complications after the treatment. In recent years, a realistic thermal model accounting for patient-specific materials to design HIFU treatment plans was introduced, along with an evolutionary strategy to optimize them. However, the execution times of this model is too prohibitive to allow for a routine use. This paper presents a comparison of two distinct distributed evolutionary models employing a further optimized fitness model. The experiments show up to 6 times decrease in the evolution time. These improvements allowed to investigate a new real-life based benchmark and use-case.