RayBiology Ready for ASTRO 2002

9/28/2002 7:00 AM EST

August 28, 2002

Together with software engineers from Philips Radiation Oncology Systems
our development department have spent days and nights to put the final
touch to the integration of RayBiology into the Pinnacle3 treatment
planning system.

The module RayBiology adds the power of radiobiological objective
functions and constraints to radiation therapy optimization and will
(when officially released) be available as an add on module in the
P3IMRT package from Philips.

The first version will contain the following biological objective
functions:

TCP (Tumor Control Probability)

P+ (the probability to achieve complication free tumor cure),

NTCP (Normal Tissue Complication Probability), and

EUD.

A very useful and unique feature is that a biological objective function
can be combined with any number of physical constraints. For instance,
P+ can be maximized subject to a dose uniformity constraint for the
target volume. It is also possible to combine a physical objective
function with biological constraints, e.g. a desired dose distribution
can be defined in terms of the physical objectives such as 'Min Dose',
'Max DVH' etc., and be combined with a constraint on the maximum NTCP
allowed for a particular organ at risk.

The objective function must be either biological or physical while the
list of constraints can contain any number of both biological and
physical constraints. In other words, adding RayBiology to RayOptimizer
greatly extends the toolbox for accurately capturing the clinical
treatment objectives.