Techna and UHN’s Technology Development and Commercialization office are pleased to announce that UHN has exclusively licensed a new artificial intelligence (AI) technology for automated treatment planning to RaySearch Laboratories AB, a global leader in radiation therapy treatment planning systems, for incorporation into the RayStation® platform which is currently used in over 2,600 clinics in more than 65 countries.
The license gives RaySearch the ability to integrate deep learning algorithms from Princess Margaret Cancer Centre’s AI automated planning technology platform into the RaySearch’s RayStation® treatment planning system. The AI automated planning technology will be built into RayStation’s® extensive module for automated treatment planning across a multiple of treatment sites, enabling rapid adoption from their clinical customers.
Princess Margaret has been developing AI technologies to automate radiation therapy processes over the last several years. AutoPlanning, developed by Physicist Dr. Tom Purdie and Researcher Dr. Chris McIntosh at the Princess Margaret provides a fundamentally different paradigm for generating radiation therapy treatment plans compared with both current manual and automated methods. Conventional methods have focused on learning a few treatment parameters, whereas AutoPlanning learns to model the shape and intensity of the radiation treatment as it is related to the patient’s images, reducing planning times from multiple hours or longer to minutes while requiring minimal upfront preparation or user interaction.
The AutoPlanning AI technology uses customized machine-learning and image processing to determine the relevant features of treatment plans and learn quantitative relationships between patients to automatically create radiotherapy treatment plans. “AutoPlanning has a machine-learning engine that automatically learns from previous plans and determines what the best plan for a new patient is supposed to look like,” explains Dr. Purdie. “The license to RaySearch will make AutoPlanning available to hospitals across the globe allowing them to create better plans more efficiently.”