Radiation Therapy

When planning a therapy, different competing quality criteria like prospects of treatment success, risk of side effects and costs have to be considered. Thereby, chances and risks must be individually balanced for every patient. Using a real-time decision support tool the most appropriate treatment for a patient can be interactively selected from them.

These tools developed by ITWM are implemented in the commercial treatment planning system Eclipse(R) by the largest supplier of radiation therapy treatment equipment Varian Medical Systems. During planning, the treating physician can manipulate the radiation therapy plan in real time and trade off chances and risks of the treatment.

Video: Tailor-Made Radiation Therapy

Radiation therapy is one of the most essential elements in cancer treatment. But properly planning radiation therapy is a highly complex task. We have joined an alliance with medical physicists and physicians to improve the therapy planning process.

Development of the interactive multi-criterion radiation therapy planning system earned our researchers Karl-Heinz Küfer, Michael Bortz, Alexander Scherrer, Philipp Süss and Katrin Teichert and their research partners Thomas Bortfeld, Jürgen Debus, Wolfgang Schlegel and Christian Thieke the Stifterverband for German Science‘s 2016 award. The jury specifically recognized »the broad viability of the method in treating thewidespread illness of cancer as well as the relevance to international markets.«