Radiotherapy Treatment Planning Software

The vendor is required to provide operational guidance services (the “services”) for radiotherapy treatment planning software services.
- Radiotherapy TPS systems have several component key functions: beam modeling, image registration, image segmentation, treatment plan design, treatment plan adaptation/dose accumulation and deformation, and treatment plan export/documentation.
- Addition to these basic characteristics, the ability to customize the systems via scripting or other automated workflow enhancements is important to our clinical and research efforts; another important characteristics of any TPS system is the ability to work “location-free” via easily accessible open standard communication protocols that can be accessed via most common personal computer and tablet devices; an additional feature of any system is the ability to support non-clinical users in our research and educational programs.
- beam modeling
• The system shall be able to numerically represent (model) our photon/electron treatment units (Varian Novalis and Elektra versa HD) and should have tools to help develop user specific models.
• The quality of the model shall be able to meet our clinical requirements.
• The system shall have tools to evaluate the quality of these models and to ensure the models maintain their integrity after software upgrades.
- Image registration
• The system shall be able to bring in a collection of volumetric image sets from CT, MRI, PET, etc., via the DICOM communication standard.
• It shall have tools to register these images to one-another via DICOM coordinates and/or internal image information both via manual manipulation by the operator and with computer assisted tools; deformable registration that would both deform the datasets and associated DICOM-RT structures is desirable but not required.
- Image segmentation:
• There shall be both automated and manual image segmentation tools that allow the operator to work across multiple registered images during segmentation.
• The manual tools should be intuitive and efficient allowing the user to quickly define structures used in planning.
• Automated tools shall provide segmentation for the majority of normal structures used in radiotherapy planning.
• These shall have user customizable organ libraries to enhance the usefulness of the automated segmentation tools in our environment.
- Treatment plan design:
• The planning software shall be the ability to create and optimize plans to be delivered with photons and electrons in the megavoltage energy range and delivered by common linear accelerators currently available in the market.
• These plans shall be simple unmodulated plans (generally referred to as 2d and 3d plans), intensity modulated radiotherapy plans (IMRT), and volumetric arc modulated plans (VMAT).
• The optimization tools available for the creation of the IMRT and VMAT plans shall be able to efficiently create plans considered acceptable by our professional staff.
• The resultant plans, both modulated and unmodulated, shall have the physics of the beams properly modeled so that our QA metrics pass within a clinical acceptable range; the ability to plan other modalities, such as scattered and modulated proton beams as well as marline’s shall be considered but is not a minimal requirement for these systems.
• The ability to optimize plans using novel approaches/optimization algorithms shall also be considered as will the ability to automatically create alternative plans with different modalities and the same dose constraints.
- Treatment plan adaptation/dose accumulation:
• The systems shall either intrinsically, or with user created add-ons, enable the importation of prior dose distributions, and use these as a basis for future plan optimization on new volumetric datasets; these shall include dose deformed based on the deformation of the reference datasets.
• The system shall allow automated importation and processing of this data for efficient review of accumulated dose for both clinical and research needs.
- Plan documentation/finalization:
•The system shall have either intrinsic or user creatable systems for efficient documentation of the treatment plan.
• The documentation shall take the form or an open standards document, such as postscript or pdf that can be created based on advanced user defined templates; there shall be a means for including customized report pages with dose summary statistics and comparisons against user defined metrics.
• There shall also be a means of ensuring the plans and reports meet our treatment machine abilities and other user-defined physical limitations.

- Contract Period/Term: 3 years