The development of a decision support system with an interactive clinical user interface for estimating treatment parameters in radiation therapy in order to reduce radiation dose in head and neck patients

摘要

The primary goal in radiation therapy is to target the tumor with the maximum possible radiation dose while limiting the radiation exposure of the surrounding healthy tissues. However, in order to achieve an optimized treatment plan, many constraints, such as gender, age, tumor type, location, etc. need to be considered. The location of the malignant tumor with respect to the vital organs is another possible important factor for treatment planning process which can be quantified as a feature making it easier to analyze its effects. Incorporation of such features into the patient's medical history could provide additional knowledge that could lead to better treatment outcomes. To show the value of features such as relative locations of tumors and surrounding organs, the data is first processed in order to calculate the features and formulate a feature matrix. Then these feature are matched with retrospective cases with similar features to provide the clinician with insight on delivered dose in similar cases from past. This process provides a range of doses that can be delivered to the patient while limiting the radiation exposure of surrounding organs based on similar retrospective cases. As the number of patients increase, there will be an increase in computations needed for feature extraction as well as an increase in the workload for the physician to find the perfect dose amount. In order to show how such algorithms can be integrated we designed and developed a system with a streamlined workflow and interface as prototype for the clinician to test and explore. Integration of the tumor location feature with the clinician's experience and training could play a vital role in designing new treatment algorithms and better outcomes. Last year, we presented how multi-institutional data into a decision support system is incorporated. This year the presentation is focused on the interface and demonstration of the working prototype of informatics system.