SBIR Phase II: Roentgen: An Intelligent Radiotherapy Planner

这个小企业创新研究二期项目旨在创建临床可行的基于病例的放射治疗计划助手，以及为医疗任务构建其他基于病例的智能助手的工具。关键的创新是该工具能够对医学图像进行推理，并从现有的医学数据档案（包括文本和多媒体）中开发其初始病例库。该项目的直接好处是提高放射治疗计划的质量和一致性。由于以前的病例可以作为指导，经验不足的剂量师可以直接从专家的经验中获益。此外，基于伦琴的通用工具的开发有可能将这种益处扩展到其他医学领域。还有其他方法来构建智能医疗咨询系统，最值得注意的是那些基于专家系统技术的方法。然而，这些系统不能像伦琴那样利用现有的医疗档案，而且开发和维护成本要高得多。该项目将沿着两条战线进行。首先是现有的伦琴放射治疗系统的进一步发展和临床评价。第二个发展方向是将伦琴的技术推广到基于案例的推理外壳中。这样的工具将有助于为其他医疗领域创建许多类似于伦琴的基于案例的助手，特别是那些需要视觉推理的领域。伦琴和相关工具的商业潜力在于它们能够智能地利用已经通过医院信息系统和医学图像收集的数据。这些系统将惰性数据转化为一种有助于新患者治疗的机构记忆。

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.