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During the last 2 years we have been working on developing a DICOM-RT (Radiation Therapy) ePR (Electronic Patient
Record) with decision support that will allow physicists and radiation oncologists during their decision-making process.
This ePR allows offline treatment dose calculations and plan evaluation, while at the same time it compares and
quantifies treatment planning algorithms using DICOM-RT objects. The ePR framework permits the addition of
visualization, processing, and analysis tools, which combined with the core functionality of reporting, importing and
exporting of medical studies, creates a very powerful application that can improve the efficiency while planning cancer
treatments.
Usually a Radiation Oncology department will have disparate and complex data generated by the RT modalities as well
as data scattered in RT Information/Management systems, Record & Verify systems, and Treatment Planning Systems
(TPS) which can compromise the efficiency of the clinical workflow since the data crucial for a clinical decision may be
time-consuming to retrieve, temporarily missing, or even lost. To address these shortcomings, the ACR-NEMA
Standards Committee extended its DICOM (Digital Imaging & Communications in Medicine) standard from Radiology
to RT by ratifying seven DICOM RT objects starting in 1997 [1,2]. However, they are not broadly used yet by the RT
community in daily clinical operations. In the past, the research focus of an RT department has primarily been
developing new protocols and devices to improve treatment process and outcomes of cancer patients with minimal effort
dedicated to integration of imaging and information systems. Our attempt is to show a proof-of-concept that a DICOM-RT
ePR system can be developed as a foundation to perform medical imaging informatics research in developing
decision-support tools and knowledge base for future data mining applications.
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