IMRT a common and successful prostate cancer treatment

Prostate cancer, the most common form of cancer in U.S. men, is also one of the most treatable: According to the journal Seminars in Radiation Oncology, 90 percent of patients who undergo intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) in the early stages are disease free after five years. So, in less than a decade, IMRT  has become a common and successful prostate cancer treatment.

IMRT uses three-dimensional images of the cancerous tumor and surrounding tissues to conform the radiation beams to the size and shape of the tumor. Radiation doses are customized for each patient, with the goal of maximizing the dose to the tumor and minimizing the radiation received by surrounding healthy tissue primarily the bladder, rectum and femoral heads. 

But developing individual IMRT treatment plans is still a time consuming process derived through trial and error, so a team of researchers at Duke University Medical Center wants to automate and optimize the process of developing IMRT treatment plans. They’ve developed a tool that draws on prior clinically approved treatment plans to create new plans and are working with RENCI (the Renaissance Computing Institute at UNC Chapel Hill) to improve the tool.