We're delighted to announce the implementation of RapidPlan™ at the Edinburgh Cancer Centre radiotherapy department; a cutting-edge machine learning tool from Varian Medical Systems, that promises to accelerate our treatment planning process. RapidPlan™ was provided as part of the latest LINAC procurement exercise and is integrated into the Varian software.
Radiotherapy planning is a balancing act between two competing goals: delivering a lethal dose of radiation to the tumour, whilst sparing surrounding healthy tissues to minimise the risk of toxicities. Traditionally radiotherapy planning is an iterative approach, often requiring several plan alterations before finding the best way of delivering the treatment. This approach is bespoke to each individual patient and can be time-consuming, especially for complex cases where the tumour is close to radiosensitive organs.
RapidPlan™ uses a machine learning model trained with historical treatment data, to predict how an optimal treatment plan might look based on our past treatments, giving a head start on the planning process and significantly reducing the time needed to find the best plan and was provided as part of the latest LINAC procurement exercise and is integrated into the Varian software. The initial rollout of RapidPlan™ for patients with nodal prostate cancer has shown significant time saving for the physics treatment planning team with an optimal plan now found in 3-9 minutes instead of 10-20 minutes previously. RapidPlan™ has also demonstrated improvements in the quality and consistency of plans, with better sparing of healthy tissues. These improvements will allow us to accelerate the treatment planning process, reduce the risk of treatment related toxicities, and optimise time for staff to focus on more complex cases and to accommodate the growing demand for radiotherapy. Feedback from both planning staff and clinicians has been positive, with enthusiasm for expanding its application to additional tumour sites in future