This collaborative grant provides travel support to enable students and postdocs to attend the High-Performance Numerical Methods Supporting Radiation Therapy Treatment Planning Workshop that will be held at Lehigh University, May 9-11, 2014. The funds will help reduce the travel cost burden on students and thereby improve student participation at the workshop. It is expected that approximately 10 students will benefit from these travel funds. Students will participate in the scientific sessions and also present their work at a dedicated poster session.
The workshop provides an excellent opportunity for students to broaden the impact of their work. In addition, it is a unique opportunity for the students to network with peers, leaders in the field, and future collaborators. Through the travel grant, the SES community will be able to increase student participation in the workshop.
Radiation and proton therapy is a dominant modality for treating various cancers. Motion-induced, structural and biological uncertainties in radiation therapy severely limit the efficacy of the treatment. We target minimizing adverse effects of uncertainties and optimally utilizing the capabilities of equipment to develop high-precision therapy by using a combination of novel image processing algorithms, image guidance, and novel large-scale numerical and robust optimization techniques. The workshop was bringing together a unique team of optimization experts, applied mathematicians, medical physicists, radiation oncologists, and industry experts, and it targeted the development of a set of integrated strategic directions for collaboration in high-performance numerical methods that support optimal radiosurgery, radiation therapy treatment planning and related applications. The workshophighlighted the added value of optimization and sophisticated inverse planning methods in RT planning, demosntrated that such advanced methodologies provide a streamlined platform for comparison of models and methods for RT optimization. The workshop participants identified the need: - to establish an online server-type environment for collaboration in RT research, where methodologies, sofware and data sets are shared; - provide (online anonymized) data-sharing environment for optimizer and alike, via unified formats, such as CERR format, DICOMM, etc.; - provide experimental front-end for med physicists to run a chosen optimization model/algorithm on the server and see the results, similar to NEOS Optimization www.neos-server.org/neos/ Framework: The participants discussed that such a project may fit into a larger NIH grant, and be supplemented wit NSF like requests. Server is planned to be hosted by: Lehigh, and mirrored at the University of Toronto
