A research agreement with Varian Medical Systems has resulted in the acquisition of their ECLIPSE commercial treatment planning system with the understanding that components of the ROB system will be developed and integrated to improve on multimodality image registration and overlay of 3D volumetric data sets using specialized hardware with real-time volume rendering. The ROB treatment planning system has been transformed into a research platform to support the integration of novel imaging technologies into the treatment planning process. There are also plans to include the ROB Treatment Planning System with TELESYNERGY, the ROB-CIT high speed clinical teleconferencing platform. As part of the research mission of ROB-TPS, file/image import and export in RTOG format has been implemented for a clinical research project using the PEREGRINE Monte Carlo dose calculation engine. ROB is in the process of acquiring a replacement PEREGRINE computer to conclude outstanding clinical research projects.
