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ESTRO 36 2017
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intra-fraction monitoring, dose accumulation /
reconstruction and perhaps dose adaptation? Current
research which aims to overcome these limitations will be
highlighted.
Teaching Lecture: Radiomics for physicists –
understanding feature extraction, modelling,
performance validation and applications of radiomics
SP-0384 Radiomics for physicists – understanding
feature extraction, modelling, performance validation
and applications of radiomics
S. Walsh
1
1
MAASTRO Clinic, Maastricht, The Netherlands
The field of radiomics, the high-throughput mining of
quantitative image features from (standard-of-care)
medical imaging for knowledge extraction and application
within clinical decision support systems to improve
diagnostic, prognostic, and predictive accuracy, offers
significant and substantial advances for the medical
community. Radiomics utilizes advanced image
analysis/machine-learning techniques coupled with the
explosion of medical imaging data to develop and validate
potent quantitative imaging biomarkers (QIB) for precision
medicine. This lecture describes the practice of
radiomics, its hazards, challenges/opportunities, and its
potential to support clinical decision making (currently
predominantly in oncology, however, all imaged patients
may benefit from QIBs). Lastly, the discipline of radiomics
is developing swiftly; though it is absent standardized
evaluation of both the scientific veracity and the clinical
importance of published radiomics investigations. There is
an obvious and evident need for rigorous evaluation
criteria and reporting strategies to guarantee that
radiomics fulfills its promise. To this end for both
retrospective and prospective studies, the radiomics
quality score (RQS:
www.radiomics.org)and an online
digital phantom (DOI: 10.17195/candat.2016.08.1) are
offered to provide guidance and help meet this need in
the field of radiomics.
Teaching Lecture: Focus on lung cancer: What a
radiotherapy department should offer their patients
SP-0385 Focus on lung cancer: What a radiotherapy
department should offer their patients
M. Guckenberger
1
1
University Hospital Zürich, Department of Radiation
Oncology, Zurich, Switzerland
After years of stagnation, the treatment of lung cancer has
recently advanced tremendously. This rapid progress is
associated with new challenges and requirements on the
optimal radio-oncological care of lung cancer. Most
importantly, radiotherapy for lung cancer needs to be
integrated into a multi-disciplinary and multi-professional
team involving medical oncology, pulmonology, thoracic
surgery, radiation oncology, pathology, radiology, nuclear
medicine, psycho-oncology and palliative care. National
and international guidelines need to form the basis for
development of institutional specific guidelines and each
team member should be aware of the each other’s
qualifications and limitations. Institutional experience has
been demonstrated to affect outcome in radiotherapy for
early and local advanced stage NSCLC forming the rational
for more centralized lung cancer care. Treatment decision
making should be performed in multi-disciplinary tumor
boards.
Concomitant
radio-chemotherapy
is
recommended in all appropriately selected patients with
locally advanced NSCLC but only little progress has been
made in this field: whereas new a large number of new
drugs have made their way into treatment of stage IV
NSCLC (EGFR inhibitors, ALK inhibitors, immunotherapy)
none has been approved as combination partner with
radiotherapy, yet. Imaging for staging and target volume
definition should be stage and location adapted including
CT with or w/o IV contrast, FDG-PET CT and consider
information from endoscopic staging. A motion
compensation strategy is required for all patients with
respiration correlated 4D-CT imaging forming the basis;
there are no clinically significant differences in the
specific motion compensation strategy. Treatment
planning using static or dynamic rotational intensity
modulated techniques have largely replaced 3D conformal
techniques especially in complex shaped early stage and
locally advanced stage of disease. Risk adapted
fractionation is standard in stereotactic body radiotherapy
for early stage NSCLC and total doses need to be >100Gy
BED. Based on the RTOG 0617 trial, conventionally
fractionated doses of 60 – 66Gy remain a standard of care
and further dose escalation should only be performed in
centers with sufficient expertise. Image-guided treatment
delivery is highly recommended in curative treatment for
lung cancer. Adaptive re-planning is frequently necessary
in case of larger anatomical changes. Adaptive re-planning
for a shrinking tumor is technically challenging and may
reduce doses to organs at risk especially in patients with
very large tumor volumes, where a curative dose is
otherwise hard to achieve. Follow-up and evaluation of
the institutional specific results are important
components of all quality assurance systems.
Teaching Lecture: How to write a research proposal for
a grant?
SP-0386 How to write a research proposal for a grant?
P. Lambin
1
1
MAASTRO Clinic, Maastricht, The Netherlands
Introduction:
Financial resources from Universities are
cut down and scientists are more often expected to fund
their own research. There are different phases in the
process of writing grants, summarized hereunder:
Step 0: Identify what your expertise is in which you will
have convincing papers and/ore preliminary data. Screen
the possible grants for scientific research regularly. (6-12
months before the deadline for submission)
Step 1: When you have identified grants that are suitable
for your work, try to get as much information as possible
about the grant itself. Identify the (best) partners that you
will need for your research project, especially in the case
of proposals for the European Commission.
Step 2: Write a skeleton of the research proposal with
brief concepts, hypothesis objective and keywords for
each of the main parts of the proposal. This should be
completed at least 3 months before the deadline for
submission. Before doing too much work, discuss it with
experts and colleagues of your departments. It is easy at
this point to make big changes in the structure of the
proposal, but very difficult after much of the writing has
been done. A research proposal consists of several parts:
Background
(
Problem definition):
insist on the “why” you
want to do this.