Designing Radiotherapy Software Components and Systems That Will Work Together.
The radiation treatment planning and delivery process requires that many different computerized data sources, software tools, and computer control systems be smoothly integrated. These include computer-controlled accelerators and new digital imaging modalities. At the same time, the applications themselves are becoming increasingly complex. In radiotherapy, the variety of components to integrate is much greater than in other areas of clinical medicine, growing out of more than a 30-year history of use of highly stylized traditional computer applications and many rigid conventions and practices associated with these computer programs. The introduction of new tools and computer-controlled equipment influenced the evolution of radiotherapy planning software, leading us to take a new look at how radiotherapy planning is done. Addressing and solving these integration problems as a serious research undertaking is vital to continued success in deploying computer applications for clinical use. New software design ideas such as object oriented design, behavioral abstraction and mediators can solve these problems. Our experience shows that the time and effort to build high-quality adaptable modular systems can be kept modest and within the reach of a small development team.
Kalet
IJ
Radiation Oncology Department, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA