Conferences & Events
Artificial Intelligence and Automation to Improve Access to High-Quality Radiotherapy Planning across the World
A symposium to discuss how automation (including AI) can safely and effectively support clinical workflow.
Date: April 7, 2021 from 7-10 a.m. CDT
Contouring and planning for radiotherapy treatments can be time-consuming tasks. Many groups are developing artificial intelligence (AI) and other automation tools to improve clinical workflows. One example is the Radiation Planning Assistant (RPA), which we are developing specifically to support the creation of high-quality treatment plans at clinics across the world, focusing on those with budget/resource limitations.
The goals of this symposium are to:
- Introduce how AI and other automation tools can be used in radiation oncology planning
- Introduce the Radiation Planning Assistant, including a demo
- Carefully review quality, efficiency and risk when introducing remote auto-planning tools into clinical practice
- Use focus groups to discuss hurdles to use, including how variations in patient populations and clinical practice will affect the use of a centralized tool; risk and safe deployment; and the best ways to scale these efforts to support radiotherapy as widely and effectively as possible.
A primary aim of this symposium is to actively engage with participants, towards improving AI and automation projects so they can eventually help as many under-resourced clinics as possible. We will use the RPA as a specific example (case study) to lead feedback and discussion.
Symposium format
We will use a mix of pre-recorded presentations and live focus groups. We are planning to release a series of recorded presentations (two to three hours) two weeks before the symposium date – thus allowing participants to fit in watching those sessions around their daily schedules.
The live symposium on April 7 will include live Q&A, a session on risk and safe deployment, and then three focus group sessions. We hope the focus groups (30 minutes each) will give all participants the opportunity to voice their opinions – perhaps leading to a consensus manuscript that we will try to publish with (optional) group authorship (i.e. all symposium participants as authors or collaborators).
Radiation Planning Assistant
The Radiation Planning Assistant (RPA) is being developed at MD Anderson to offer a suite of fully-automated high-quality contouring and radiotherapy treatment planning tools.
We are working towards providing these as a web-based service, primarily to clinics in low- and middle-income countries, where radiation therapy is the most needed and least accessible. The RPA is powered by a variety of artificial intelligence and other automation tools, including automated quality assurance.
