Royal Philips : Where artificial intelligence in healthcare can make a dramatic difference for patients with cancer

Typically, the time to 'get it right' from the initial image to first therapeutic dose is about 12 days. Why? Every single tumor is a different shape, size and in a different location. Every patient's age and severity is different and their health status is different. All of those variables impact the plan. Considering the many variables involved, and the quality assurance involved, twelve days may seem reasonable, it may even seem inconsequential, but not for patients with cancer. If you are a patient that has an aggressive form of lung cancer and you're waiting for 12 days before therapy even begins, that's an incredibly long period of time to wait.

This is where Adaptive Intelligence can make a critical difference and enable us to go from 12 days of waiting to an image-to-plan treatment that can start in 1-2 days. With adaptive intelligence, we can eliminate going through multiple iterations manually and do it much, much faster. This is a huge advancement in the treatment of cancer.

Radiation therapy is an example of precision medicine - highly individualized. There are numerous parameters and constraints that you must be able to satisfy while at the same time adhere to the contour of the tumor from all the different perspectives of the radiation beam. In a radiation therapy system, the radiation doesn't just come in from one direction - the entire contraption spins around the patient repeatedly, and as its spinning around the patient, it changes the contour of the radiation beam so that it doesn't hit vital organs. Tumors are not perfectly spherical, there's often some odd shape to it, so as you change your angle, you have to adapt the radiation beam to the shape of the tumor from that particular perspective. These shifting variables make radiation therapy not only highly individualized but very complicated as well.