PhD student to develop INSTantaneous treatment plan Optimisation for RADiotherapy (INSTORAD) using artificial intelligence

Radiotherapy for a cancer patient requires development of a treatment plan, defining the individualized treatment unit settings that result in a favorable dose distribution in the patient, balancing probability of cure versus development of radiation-induced complications. Currently, treatment plan generation is an inefficient time-consuming and fragmented process. This may result in suboptimal treatment plan quality, i.e. the patient could have received a better treatment. With instantaneous treatment plan generation available, the workflow becomes more efficient, different trade-offs between cure and complications can be readily explored as well as other treatment options, thereby further personalizing the treatment. In addition, this process can also shorten patient waiting time before commence of treatment.

To enable such change in clinical practice, plans with high-quality dose distributions should be generated instantaneously. The department is a world leader in the field of automated generation of highest quality plans using mathematical optimization approaches. For the required high-speed plan generation in INSTORAD, deep learning networks will be trained using our in-house optimization tools. As a PhD student you will investigate options of using deep learning approaches to accurately and fastly generate highest quality plans. Tools will be developed for clinical application of the deep learning plans, and the systems will be validated for clinical use. Both treatments with photon (X-ray) beams and protons beams will be investigated.

The research will be performed in a multi-disciplinary team with physicists, mathematicians and clinicians from Erasmus MC, with active collaborations with the University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, and the Institute of Cancer Research in London. The INSTORAD project is embedded in the postgraduate school of Molecular Medicine of the Erasmus University.