Algorithm targets cancer

A new computer-based technique could eliminate hours of manual adjustment associated with a popular cancer treatment.

Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT) has exploded in popularity for treating cancer, but the technique can require hours of manual tuning to determine an effective radiation treatment for a given patient.

Now, a team led by Richard Radke, assistant professor of electrical, computer, and systems engineering at Rensselaer and his associates at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in the US, are developing a means to perform the tuning operation automatically.

Radke and his co-workers have developed an algorithm to do just that and have tested it on 10 prostate cancer patients at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. They found that for 70 percent of the cases, the algorithm automatically determined an appropriate radiation therapy plan in about 10 minutes.

“The main goal of radiation therapy is to irradiate a tumour with a very high dose, while avoiding all of the healthy organs,” Radke said. He described early versions of radiation therapy as a “fire hose” approach, applying a uniform stream of particles to overwhelm cancer cells with radiation.