Treatment Efficiency Subcommittee
Co-Chairs:
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Purpose:
Fighting cancer effectively and efficently.
Vision:
As an integral part of PTCOG, our ultimate goal is to establish, develop, and improve particle therapy modalities and their workflow applications in such a way that the treatment of our patients can be delivered and assured in the utmost efficient way in terms of quality and safety.
Mission:
Concrete definitions of efficiency are highly domain-specific. In general, efficient can be interpreted as achieving maximum productivity with minimum effort or cost. In our context, we understand
- maximum productivity to mean safe, effective, and innovative treatment - not simply more treatments - and
- minimum effort or cost to be the selection of the best modality for resource-optimized application of the intended irradiation.
Based on these considerations, we focus our activities on workflow efficiencies, which should allow for
- accurate and realistic planning of the irradiation dose in a reasonable time frame,
- together with the safe and effective application of the calculated dose distribution,
- aiming at imaging, measurement and control of predefined application conditions,
- accompanied by comprehensive QA measures before, during, and after irradiation,
- to mitigate and/or minimize any risk to the patient.
Objective:
The main factors impacting workflow efficiencies ultimately result from the particular characteristic particle properties we use for tumor irradiation and the resulting, clinical expectations in the context of the latest technical developments. Therefore, we see our role in sharing and transferring knowledge about the following influencing factors on workflow efficiencies according to our mission statement.
- Complexity of workflow-driven QA (general & patient-specific)
- Delineation tools
- Patient immobilization and couches
- Treatment planning processes and systems
- Dose calculation algorithms
- Motion management strategies
- Image guidance
- Beam delivery
- Level of timely treatment adaptation capability (adaptive proton or particle therapy)
- Overall integration/Workflow management
- Data connectivity
- (Lack of) standardization (due to limited number of treatment sites)
- ….
Subcommittee Meetings:
Bibliography:
- Publications, update in progress