This Core will address (1) information management for clinical and physics projects, (2) treatment planningand delivery issues related to bi-institutional collaborative trials, and (3) statistical issues. The tasks will becoordinated by the Core Directors, Michael Gillin, Ph.D., and Beow Yeap, Sc.D., and the Co-Investigators.The management of this Core will be a team effort, with each investigator contributing within their area ofspecialization. The team will use two different information management systems for clinical studies. Teammembers at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) will operate the 'Trial DB' patient-specific non-DICOMinformation management system for registering and randomizing patients. Secondly, both institutions willuse a database management system for DICOM-RT objects operated by the Image-guided Therapy QACenter (ITC) at Washington University (WU) in St. Louis. The second database system is necessarybecause Trial DB does not manage DICOM objects. Members of the team at M. D. Anderson Cancer Center(MDACC) will use a system called Evercore to manage DICOM and NON-DICOM databases for studies inphysics (Projects 3 and 4).MGH and MDACC have substantial experience in cooperative group activities and will address treatmentplanning and delivery issues of relevance to proton therapy trials in a bi-institutional setting in a mannerconsistent with the high standards of established cooperative groups. Explicit issues addressed in this Coreinclude proton beam calibration, treatment delivery quality assessment programs, CT-based treatmentplanning using both commercial and Monte Carlo approaches, and protocol compliance.Team members from MGH and MDACC agree to work with the Radiological Physics Center, which willprovide an independent review of treatment planning and treatment delivery systems used in this programproject. Our experience with trials in the bi-institutional settings should serve as the basis to define standardsfor the use of protons in multi-institutional trials. The knowledge gained will be communicated to cooperativegroups for their consideration.
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