The primary goal of the Resource Center for Emerging Technologies (RCET) at the University of Florida (UF) is to provide the technical resources necessary to improve radiotherapy patient outcomes. The advanced medical informatics technology used in the design of the RCET infrastructure can facilitate education, collaboration, and peer review, as well as provide an environment in which clinical investigators can receive, share, and analyze voluminous multimodality clinical data. The confluence of these endeavors will lead to improved patient care. The RCET will provide resources that will facilitate the conduct of NCI-sponsored advanced-technology Radiation Therapy clinical trials while maintaining patient confidentiality, timeliness of data submission, and optimal utilization of resources. A broader yet germane objective is to make these resources available to the researchers for better protocol design, protocol compliance monitoring, and outcome analysis. Specifically, we propose to provide secure auto-anonymizing upload and auto-archiving patient database resources for institutions participating in advanced technology clinical trial groups. This should permit efficient and secure archiving of diagnostic images, treatment planning images, radiotherapy plan data, and demographic information. We will provide a web-based Secure Object Archiving Network System (SOANS) that can be readily linked with the databases of other NCI funded cooperative clinical trial groups. The RCET system provides facilities for a web-based rapid review of archived data. A PC-based application software, NetSys not only provides facilities for clinical data preparation and submission but also provides tools for researchers to retrieve, through data mining filters, protocol patient data via the SOANS. The RCET will serve as a general technical resource to all clinical cooperative groups, QA centers, and participating institutions to facilitate the development and implementation of advanced technology protocols through the ATC initiative.
| Palta, Jatinder R; Frouhar, Vincent A; Dempsey, James F (2003) Web-based submission, archive, and review of radiotherapy data for clinical quality assurance: a new paradigm. Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys 57:1427-36 |
