Some main steps for creating a treating plan in oncology

Some main steps for creating a treating plan in oncology.

Some software provides some different steps for constitute a treating plan. In this article, I will mention some principal steps:

Construction of patient profile.
The information of the patient is stored in a patient information server. Each software want to use a patient profile, it connects to the server and get the expected profile. In each patient profile, we attach each model. Each model contains the basic information about the patient and CT or MR, etc image serie.




Image processing.
In this process, at first, we pre-processing patient images by anti-noising, morphology, etc. Then we could use the technique of segmentation and contouring for aid doctors draw or identify the region of interest of each patient. The operation of the doctor could be semi-automatic, automatic or manual. The doctor could find out the volumn of patient such as the cancer region, organ, etc.

Planning.
At this step, we would set the parameters for the radiation machine, the information about the radiation, the dose of the radiation, the protecting region. The information of the machine includes the gantry, couch, collimator, etc. The information about the radiation includes the number of beam, dose, diretion, gantry, collimator... In order to protect the patient from the danger of radiation, we have to create the equipment which ban the radiation.

Optimisation.
After construct the planning, we need to optimize the created plan. The optimization base on constraints about the Region of Interest (ROI), Flash, or dose of the radiation. Afther the optimization, we obtain the corresponding segment of each beam and dose for each beam. The optimization is done or not. That is optional.

Evaluation.
Some software supports the graphic simulation and graph for the plan evaluation. The doctor could see the distribution of the radiation for the treated region and the near region. This evaluation helps doctors to predict the result of the treatment.
At this step, the planer would calculate whether the distribution of radiation at each volumn satisfait the above constraints. A good plan is a plan where the treated volumn get the enough dose and the other region get the minimal as possible dose.

Finishing.
After all the above steps, the doctor will decide to accept the plan or not. He would export the treatment plan to the format of controlling if it is accepted. This helps diminue the risk in treatment operation. And all the information is stored into the system and the treatment can start now.