Radiotherapy to become more accurate

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Dose planning is fundamentally important to radiotherapy treatment of tumours: get the dose too low, and the tumour will be unharmed, get the does too high, and healthy tissue will be damaged. With Engage funding, the Monte Carlo Treatment Planning (MCTP) project will make new techniques for quickly generating dose calculations more reliable and available to a wider user group.

A collaboration between the Cardiff School of Computer Science and the Department of Medical Physics at the Velindre Cancer Centre has been conducting ground-breaking research with distributed-computing resources. Currently, their resources are distributed only on a local scale. Funding from the Engage Initiative will make the technology available on the National Grid Service, which will open the door to a wider and more diverse community of researchers and clinicians. One of the main challenges that prevents the dose-planning application being accessed by clinicians throughout the UK is the problem of integrating it with other systems – such as the NHS firewall. In response to this problem, the Engage Initiative has assembled a team of security experts from OMII-UK, who will work with the Cardiff developers to overcome security issues.

Monte Carlo techniques help to more accurately determine the radiation dose received by a tumour and neighbouring healthy tissue, but each calculation can take days to run using standard equipment. Whilst the radiotherapy process is cost-effective, the complex and computationally intensive dose calculation makes the overall treatment cost prohibitive. The precursor to the MCTP, the RTGrid project, saw researchers at Cardiff using distributed computing to significantly reduce computation times and treatment costs.

With over 289,000* cases of cancer diagnosed each year in the UK, new techniques for cancer treatment are vital to the lives of thousands of people. The MCTP project will ensure that the new cost-effective dose-planning technology is available to clinicians all over the country.