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Business Experiment in Enhanced IMRT planning using Grid services on-demand with SLAS (BEinEIMRT) in a few words...

The goal of this BE is to demonstrate that GRID can be used to provide new compute intensive services for Radiotherapy remotely. Using the vast computing resources of GRID, it is possible to deliver new services as Monte Carlo plan verification that are almost impossible using only local computing resources.

Case Study

Download the BEInEIMRT – Business Experiment in Enhanced IMRT Planning Using Grid Services on Demand with SLAs (BE25) - case study

Situation

Radiotherapy (RT) is currently delivered to 50 % of cancer patients in developed countries. The aim of this therapy is to irradiate the insane tissue sparing the healthy surrounding organs. Every RT treatment must be planned in advance with specialized computational tools or treatment planning systems (TPS) running on workstations at hospital premises. Specialized personnel calculate treatment plans either from previous experience, trial-and-error class-solutions or, for more complex treatment plans, built-in optimization tools. These TPS are subject to very severe constraints on computer power and time to produce practical results, due to hospital workload and limited access to new algorithms. The requirements in maximum computation time forces TPS tools to perform approximations, both in dose calculations and optimization.

Each treatment has to be experimentally verified prior to actual delivery to the patient but in-phantom intensive measurements require lots of time. This could be avoided or minimized by employing Monte Carlo techniques to simulate the treatment in silico.

Objectives

The limitations and drawbacks of current TPS could be avoided if computationally intensive user-friendly environments were available. The BEinEIMRT experiment focuses on them by integrating several tools to help radiotherapists in selecting the best treatments, and finally, improve the quality of the treatments delivered to the patients at affordable cost.

The objectives of the BEinEIMRT consortium are:

Use the Grid to provide a high-quality service to hospitals –the end users- in a transparent way.
Provide a remote service to verify and optimize radiotherapy treatments based in the SOA and/or Internet paradigms.
Build a scalable, extensible platform allowing the provision of new services, as well as the collaboration of different providers with independent strategies.

Solution

BEinEIMRT solution will offer several techniques to radiotherapists. Hospital personnel may access provided services in two ways, form conventional browses or by integrating our solution in third party applications via web services. The system back-end (completely hidden to the end user) uses massive computational power to satisfy demands in the shortest possible time. The back end will employ GRID services to obtain extra computational capacity in the event that local resources cannot admit the client requirements.

Two new services will be provided:

Verification of treatment plans. The in-house designed treatment are recalculated using Monte Carlo solutions which are known to produce more precise results.
Search treatment using optimization. Using compute intensive algorithms, the service will offer to the radiotherapists valid treatments for complex cases..

Also, this experiment will check some GRID technical components as:

GridWay, a well-known metascheduler that will allow to access local and GRID resources transparently.
SLA negotiator which will provide BEinEIMRT with the ability of guarantee enough computing resources on-time.
Portal security, which will improve the trust on the platform.

Business Impact

Number of cancer patients will increase in the next years because the ageing of the population. However, cancer can be cured. 50% of the patients can benefit of radiation therapy. BE 25 platform is the vehicle necessary to provide hospitals with new tools to improve the quality of the treatments. When available in the market, worldwide hospitals will have access to services with need high computational capacity on-demand. Using these services, they can improve the quality and effectively of the radiotherapy treatment. Only in Europe, there are more than 1000 organization which can be final users of the new platform.