Project
Digital radiation therapy patient.
The past decade has seen a revolution in radiation therapy technology, offering exceptional flexibility in dose delivery. Image guidance during treatment ensures a reliable targeting of the dose to the tumor. This has created the possibility to irradiate the tumor with a high dose with minimal exposure of surrounding tissue. Thus an improvement in tumor control is no longer invariably associated with an increase in radiation-induced toxicity.Now, the capacity exists to create treatment plans that are tailored to the specific characteristics of the patient. Thus, the success of radiotherapy depends on proper personalized therapy planning and outcome prediction. However, an individualized representational model that informs on radiation therapy planning and outcome prediction is still lacking.There are several modeling approaches available that have the potential to fill this gap, among them empirical, but established radiobiological models and more sophisticated multi-scale models.DR THERAPATs aim is to create the Digital Radiation Therapy Patient, integrating the available knowledge on tumor imaging, image analysis and interpretation, radiobiological models and radiation therapy planning into a reusable, multi-scale digital representation. DR THERAPAT will enable:
- Broad access to dose painting
- Individualized planning resulting in more effective and safer treatment
- Accurate prediction of Tumor Control Probability and Normal Tissue Complication Probability
- improve outcome
- provide a platform demonstrating the integration of modeling into the clinical workflow
- provide a platform for the validation of the models.A demonstrator of this platform will be made for prostate cancer.
With a second demonstrator for cervical cancer, we will show that the model can be translated to other forms of cancer. DR THERAPAT will adapt and integrate today's available tools into a digital representation of the patients health status and clinical workflow.