RadiotherapyGrid - Key Story

Cancer is Europe’s second largest cause of death. One of the most common and effective treatments is external radiotherapy, where a Linear Accelerator (Linac) attacks the cancerous tissue with radiation delivered from several different directions. The treatment plan – the direction, size and length of dosages – has to be carefully calculated to avoid damaging healthy tissue. These calculations can take a long time – speeding up this process would allow earlier treatment and more patients to be treated.

RadiotherapyGrid is a solution based on Grid technology that helps hospitals plan the best possible treatment for each patient. It has two core functions: verification of plans using accurate, but computationally expensive, techniques and searching for the optimal treatments. These tools improve the efficiency and effectiveness of planned treatments as well as reducing the overall cost of treatment planning. The platform can also be easily extended with further tools and algorithms as new techniques are developed.

RadiotherapyGrid produces results much quicker than hospitals are currently used to by exploiting the enormous computational resources found on the Grid. In order to make the process of contracting Grid resources transparent to the user, automatic Service Level Agreement (SLA) negotiation is required. This is achieved through the use of the SLA Negotiator component developed as part of the BEinGRID project. Given the confidential nature of the treatments and the expensive hardware involved, it is essential that no unauthorised access to the services or data occurs. This is ensured in RadiotherapyGrid through the use of the Vordel XML Gateway 5 and Axiomatics Policy Server 3 software. These packages validate common capabilities identified in BEinGRID.

As well as producing results more quickly, the solution also frees treatment facilities from the need to invest in expensive hardware required to do the calculations in-house, resulting in substantial cost savings.

The market for RadiotherapyGrid is potentially very large; within the EU alone there are 980 radiotherapy centres and this is expected to increase. RadiotherapyGrid will be primarily marketed as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform at these institutions, but may also be sold as a product bundled with HPC hardware resources.

RadiotherapyGrid shows how Grid technology can be used to save hospitals money and quickly provide more accurate treatments to cancer patients.