Mehdi Mahnam

Mehdi is a PhD candidate in industrial engineering at École Polytechnique de Montréal and a researcher at CIRRELT research center under the supervision of professors Michel Gendreau, Louis-Martin Rousseau and Nadia Lahrichi. His main research interest is modeling and optimization in healthcare and medical decision-making. He is currently working on radiation therapy treatment planning problems with regard to finding optimal radiation intensities for cancer patients. His dissertation focuses on developing efficient algorithms for Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT), a new form of radiation therapy in which the gantry rotates around the patient while the beam is on. According to the large number of voxels in the patient’s body and the combinatorial structure, this problem is difficult to solve and exact methods cannot solve this problem in real cases. As a team they propose new mathematical formulations and column generation based heuristics to efficiently solve the problem.