Here are a few excerpts from my 3MT presentation I gave at the Lancaster University Postgraduate Research Conference 2018 and The UK National Competition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Imagine a small child playing in the garden with a\nmagnifying glass trying to make fire. They use the suns high energy beams and\ndirect it to try and kill weeds, hopefully avoiding the healthy flowers.\nRadiotherapy works in a similar way. High intensity beams of energy are focused\non the cancerous cells to kill them while trying to damage the surrounding\nhealthy cells as little as possible. For this to be delivered to the patient a\ntreatment plan is made. This determines how much radiation to deliver over how\nmany sessions and where to aim. Each plan must meet certain targets to ensure\nthe treatment success. My research is concerned with whether the treatment plans\ncan be improved. If we changed something by a small amount would the resulting\ntreatment be better for the patient? What if the patient moves a little and the\nbeam doesn\u2019t go quite where expected? Or the patient has drunk more the\nprevious day so there bladder is a little bigger? All of these and many more\nintroduce uncertainty into the plan. Can we identify plans that could potentially\nimprove? Can we account for some of the uncertainty? Yes we believe we can. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have prostate cancer plans from Rosemere Cancer Centre,\nRoyal Preston Hospital. From these we extract numerical data on the amount of\nradiation and where it is being delivered to. We can then compare this to the\npast plans to see if we have done better beforehand. We identified 8 plans we\nbelieved could be improved. Preston then re-planned these and we improved\nrectal sparing by up to 18%. That\u2019s an 18% improvement to our healthy cells. We\nnow need to refine the method so we can apply it to other cancer types. Why is\nthis important? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prostate cancer is one of the easier cancers to treat and we\u2019ve seen an increase in survival rate from 25% to 84% in the last 40 years. We now hope to use data from other hospitals to look at head and neck tumours this is particularly important as the survival rate for some head and neck cancers is still only 19%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n