How one team in the Pacific Northwest adopted modern tools to adapt to changes in practice, support their staff, and improve the patient care path.
In the pursuit of continued improvement in cancer care, the field of radiation oncology is constantly evolving. Providence Portland sought out modern solutions to meet the demands of an increasingly complex clinical environment. After evaluating multiple options, the clinical team selected Radformation as their commercial partner of choice for auto-segmentation and secondary plan checks to better support their treatment offering and add flexibility and efficiency to their planning workflow.
READ: Diverse Workflows, Flexible Tools. A Radformation Workflow Wins Series
No two radiation oncology centers look the same. Because of this, Radformation is committed to creating adaptable solutions that accommodate virtually any setting—whether it’s a single-vendor setup or a diverse, mixed environment. Discover how other centers are using automation to streamline their diverse workflows and boost efficiency:
AI Contouring Improves Planning Throughput
One of the most important additions to their automation toolbox in recent years has been auto-segmentation. The ability to delegate this routine task and reassign their time to careful editing and verification of outputs has promised substantial time savings for departments. Despite having an existing atlas-based solution provided by another vendor, Providence Portland adopted AutoContour after seeing the promise of AI-generated contours.
As physicist Albert Yan lightheartedly puts it, “The dosimetrists aren’t complaining at all about physicians getting their contours done.” Incorporating deep-learning contouring has resulted in improved throughput. According to Yan, “We’re frequently seeing one-day physician contouring task turnaround times.”
The team at Providence Portland have leaned into advanced tools to support the pre-treatment workflow so physicians, physicists, and dosimetrists alike can focus on high-yield tasks to improve patient care.
Physician-Driven Contouring for Complex Cases
Even after their treatment planning system began to offer its own deep-learning contouring tools, the team at Providence Portland continued to see value in AutoContour. “We carefully benchmarked the two offerings and concluded that Radformation’s solution consistently delivers more structure models, including those that make our physician’s lives easier,” admitted Yan. “We have retained AutoContour, as it provides these additional models. This allows for parallel dosimetrist/physician effort, which further expedites the planning process,” he says.
Of note, the physicians frequently utilize CTV and lymph nodes models, which drives time savings for those with very busy clinical schedules. "I use AutoContour quite frequently, especially for H&N cases, where it saves quite a bit of time for lymph node structures,” says radiation oncologist Victor Chen. “On average, it saves about 10-15 minutes per case. For some complex contours, the time savings are even greater.” They also heavily leverage pelvic lymph node models, which are frequently required in prostate cancer cases.
Moving Toward Modern Dose Calculations
The department’s transition to ClearCalc marked another milestone in their journey toward efficiency and innovation. The decision was driven in part by their adoption of a ViewRay MRidian® system, for which their previous software lacked support. But the team also saw that ClearCalc provided the right tools for advanced treatment techniques like VMAT with high dose gradients. The dosimetrists appreciate the ease of use, as well as the ability to access the application via Citrix from virtually anywhere.
“We were looking for something more than a simple 2D calculation. The ability to choose from multiple dose points within ClearCalc is key, as it eliminates the cumbersome process involved with multiple imports/exports to find a suitable dose point,” says Yan.
Providence Portland’s adoption of intelligent solutions underscores their commitment to efficiency and forward-thinking innovation in cancer care. By integrating advanced tools, the team has not only improved their pre-planning workflow with valuable time savings for physicians and dosimetrists, but have also met the demands of new modern treatment machines that open up new opportunities for patients care.
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