ACADEMIA

Advanced analysis tools in this field will allow more personalized, elaborate treatments, more effective and less aggressive.

The optimization of radiotherapy treatments against cancer, the validation of hospital technologies and analysis of medical images have in common the fact that many times they require intensive calculations which employ supercomputers or systems of distributed computation. Teams of investigators at Galician universities and health centers have the support of the Centre of Supercomputación of Galicia (CESGA) for work in this field.

A group of investigators at the University of Vigo collaborated in the optimization of treatments of radiotherapy to adjust the doses exactly to the needs of each patient and another at the University of Santiago that investigated virtually verifying these treatments were the first calculations sent to the CESGA machines for precise avant-garde medicine. In the last case, each treatment requires 200 hours of processing until verification. A INCITE project experiment at the Xunta de Galicia allowed them to do this in the field and opened the doors to international participation.

The European project BEinGRID, which splits the work at University Hospitable Complex of Santiago (CHUS), the universities of Santiago de Compostela and Vigo and CESGA, served to validate the use of technologies like the one of distributed (grid) computation in hospitals and see it was sufficiently mature to compensate for its costs. BEinGRID ascertained that the response times of a grid network were too long for hospital needs, but in the future, even though today they still have a significant cost, cloud technologies may be feasible to use for the data processing.

Cloud in the service of medicine
The next project, Bonfire, which also involved the Supercomputing Center of Galicia, is precisely in this direction: to study how to manage virtual clusters (a set of virtual machines working in a coordinated manner) in a cloud infrastructure to service quality and speed needed by hospitals. That is, computing infrastructure would be out of the hospital and would only be used where necessary to, for example, medical image analysis or simulation of treatments.

For the verification of radiotherapy treatments using Monte Carlo simulation are being carried out within the EIMRT II project financed by the INCITE program, the validations are being made at the Universitario de Vigo (CHUVI) Hospital could be completed by the year 2012 and since the technology then could be transferred for use in hospitals, probably through agreements with venture capital firms.

In the future, the ARTFIBIO project funded by Carlos III Health Institute, aims to make a quantitative prediction of individual response to treatment with radiation for patients with head and neck cancer. For this sequence they will use a functional imaging (MRI and PET) before, after and during treatment that will join the usual anatomical information in the standard treatment using the digital image processing.

Analysis tools in this field would develop more personalized treatments today, more efficient and less aggressive in diseases like cancer and tumors identified in the images by the difference in tissue density, when in fact can already be extended to larger areas and have a different behavior. With the new systems, they can predict tumor progression and treatment knowledge to control tumor.

The project has among its members the University Hospital of Vigo and CESGA. This pipeline also has a smooth collaboration with the prestigious Karolinska Institute in Sweden.