The promise of CT-based radiotherapy treatment design remains largely unfulfilled. There is clearly a variety of reasons for this including cost considerations and physicians' justifiable reluctance to alter standard practice but also, and perhaps most importantly, a broad failure of the community to integrate the CT scanner into the process of treatment design.
We are addressing this issue by reshaping the treatment design process and the role of the CT scanner in that process in order to realize the benefit of the additional information the scanner makes available. In particular we believe that a superset of the functions of a conventional treatment simulator can be provided to an acceptable degree of fidelity by a CT scanner, appropriate computer displays, and COmputer-Aided Design software. Because it involves the interaction of a virtual simularor (provided by the CAD software) with a virtual patient (defined by CT) we call this process virtual simulation.
The primary objective of virtual simulation is to extend the treatment design options available to a radiotherapist, and to provide tools to facilitate rapid understanding and evaluation of those options, by reducing the treatment design process to an intuitive manipulation of simple pictures. We present here the key elements of the virtual simulation system and their relations to their traditional counterparts. We also discuss our prototype implementation of the CAD tool.
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