Open Source Treatment Planning Systems

Summary:

A new thread to brainstrom ways to integrate an opensource TPS with Isocentre

Open Source Treatment Planning Systems

Santam Chakraborty 20 Jan 2011 17:49

If any one of you had seen the contouring sessions we organized you will realize one of the most important things missing from it was the ability to change windows. The reason - these are not DICOM RT files you are seeing but plain image files. For the moderators who created the system it was a greater pain in the ass - we had to take screenshots, upload them to scribblar in seperate pages and then contour them and then embed them on the page.
On the top of that several users reported they were unable to see the window - scribblar does require flash installed in your browser and a relatively speedy connection.
While searching for solutions I had found educase earlier but the site looks very ill maintained.
What we really need is a TPS - and guess what I searched for open source TPS and found not one but two

1. http://www.radonc.washington.edu/medinfo/prism/
2. http://planunc.radonc.unc.edu/about/

Both are open source solutions doing a lot more than what we require. What I want is some help from any of you guys for any ideas on how to itegrate them with us. What I have in mind is hosting them from a webserver and allowing users to login remotely via internet and using it for contouring purposes. We need an online collaborative environement so a given number of users may contour on the same patient at the same time
Any ideas guys?

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Last edited on 20 Jan 2011 17:53 by Santam Chakraborty Show more

Re: Open Source Treatment Planning Systems

AAM 20 Jan 2011 20:21

openRADART

There is also a R&V/TPS open source system called "open RADART" from Austria that runs Elekta machines. It is a very large installation and instructions are in German.

DICOMPYLER

This is only a DICOM-RT viewer at present. We might use that by providing a DICOM-RT file without contours on www.isocentre.org and then uploading your contoured DICOM-RT file to a site like Dropbox on a public directory.

TPS

Getting a TPS on line may just be a case of setting a machine up for VPN access. Also Linux machines have software called XDMCP (X Display Manager Control Protocol) which can be accessed over a SSH tunnel to use software remotely.

EDUCASE

You might approach the owner of educase and ask them if they will allow you to place their software on your site. If it is not being used on their site, they might be happy to do this. Alternatively, why is educase not the answer?

Last edited on 20 Jan 2011 20:22 by AAM Show more

Re: Open Source Treatment Planning Systems

Santam Chakraborty 20 Jan 2011 20:35

You might approach the owner of educase and ask them if they will allow you to place their software on your site. If it is not being used on their site, they might be happy to do this. Alternatively, why is educase not the answer?

Because I have emailed educase guys several times but did not hear back from them . Infact contouring on their site is an option too but i could not find an option to upload my own dicom files. I can anonimyze them before upload so they are available for public use.

This is only a DICOM-RT viewer at present. We might use that by providing a DICOM-RT file without contours on www.isocentre.org and then uploading your contoured DICOM-RT file to a site like Dropbox on a public directory.

I contacted Aditya Panchal the developer of DICOMPYLER. He is still working on the software getting features into it. It coded in python and I am hopeful we will be able to integrate it sometime in future.

The SSH Tunnel and XDMCP software are an interesting suggestion. Supposing I host a TPS on a server do you think XDMCP can allow access to remote users from say a windows machine using a web login interface. I am not too knowledgeable about these things but recently we have started wondering if we should shift the site backbone to a CMS like drupal so I am investigating options like these

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Last edited on 20 Jan 2011 20:39 by Santam Chakraborty Show more

Re: Open Source Treatment Planning Systems

bastula 27 Jan 2011 14:59

We could consider writing a P2P plugin for dicompyler similar to collaborative text editors. That way, anybody on a platform that dicompyler supports could install the plugin and broadcast that they are starting a collaborative contouring session (with password if desired).

While this gets away from the whole web idea, we could have the plugin ping a page on the website whenever someone wants to start a contouring session so that others could be notified.

Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collaborative_real-time_editor for more prior art.

I have done this before with http://www.subethaedit.net/ for editing source code and text files and it works great.

Re: Open Source Treatment Planning Systems

Suruchi Singh 28 Jan 2011 07:09

We hav just been handed over Eclips n Linux by Varian. They have provided us with a "T-Box" which is a virtual learning system for contouring, beam modelling as well as simple planning, based on Eclipse. The images can be transferred as per requirement. I dont know how it can be worked out but if it can be integrated it would be a wonderful tool.

Re: Open Source Treatment Planning Systems

Santam Chakraborty 27 Jan 2011 17:38

Hi Bastula,
Thanks for your input. The plugin based system seems a nice idea as it will help the project over all. Do you think its possible to have a hosted instance of DICOMPYLER and allow users to join into it ? I dont know any coding so I guess I would not be able to code the plugin .. but the idea is useful nonetheless.
BTW I really like DICOMPYLER though presently I am running it using Wine but still it works

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Re: Open Source Treatment Planning Systems

AAM 27 Jan 2011 20:59

you can run DICOMPYLER on linux. In fact it is very easy and the instructions work. Plus when there are updates they get included.

Bastula: can you contour/volume on DICOMPYLER?

Re: Open Source Treatment Planning Systems

bastula 28 Jan 2011 01:06

Yes, Andrew is right. dicompyler is natively supported on Linux, provided you have the necessary prerequisites. It has been tested on Ubuntu 10.04 and 10.10, but other distributions may work as well. Please see the instructions on the website. I assume that if you know how to use WINE in Linux, you should no problem to get the source version of dicompyler working as well. Eventually we plan on having a package so that it can be more easily installed.

Currently you cannot contour in dicompyler, however, we plan to get that working this year. We have other things on the priority list i.e. independent DVH calculation, but it is on the roadmap.

Re: Open Source Treatment Planning Systems

Santam Chakraborty 28 Jan 2011 02:35

Yes thanks.. I got it running natively also. I had never used mercurial but its easy once you get to read about it (and use tortiseHG). However I am no coder so wont be able to develop the plugin. However I am willing to learn.
Bastula can you point me to some resources that will get a complete novice started?

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Last edited on 28 Jan 2011 02:42 by Santam Chakraborty Show more

Re: Open Source Treatment Planning Systems

bastula 28 Jan 2011 04:34

First if you aren't familiar with Python, check out http://diveintopython.org by Mark Pilgrim. It's a great resource to get started with the language.

We also have a Plugin Development Guide located here: http://code.google.com/p/dicompyler/wiki/PluginDevelopmentGuide

Once you get the hang of things, we should flesh out some more concrete ideas and goals here so that we can decide what toolkits you may need to get this working, i.e. networking, HTTP access, etc.