SBIR Phase II: Roentgen: An Intelligent Radiotherapy Planner

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9531395 Burke This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project is aimed at the creation of clinically-viable case based Radiation Therapy Planning Assistant, and a tool for constructing other case-based intelligent assistants for medical tasks. The key innovations are the ability of the tool to reason about medical images and to develop its initial case base from existing archives of medical data, both textual and multimedia. The direct benefits of this project would be to improve the quality and consistency of radiation therapy planning. Because previous cases can be used as a guide, less-experienced dosimetrists can profit from expert's experience directly. Further, the development of a generalized tool based on ROENTGEN has the potential to extend such benefits to other areas of medicine. There are other approaches to building intelligent medical advisory systems, most notably, those approaches based on expert-systems technology. However, these systems cannot take advantage of existing medical archives as ROENTGEN does and have a significantly higher development and maintenance cost. The project will proceed along two fronts. First is the further development and clinical evaluation of the existing ROENTGEN radiation therapy system. The second direction of development is to generalize the techniques of ROENTGEN into a case-based reasoning shell. Such a tool will facilitate creation of many other case-based assistants similar to ROENTGEN for other medical domains,particularly those that require visual reasoning. The commercial potential of ROENTGEN and related tools lies in their ability to make intelligent use of data already being collected through hospital information systems and medical imagery. These systems turn inert data into a type of institutional memory that can contribute to new patient treatment.