QCIF is partnering with the physics team from Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra Hospital's (PAH) Southern Area Radiation Oncology Service to help solve the problem of delays in delivering radiation doses to cancer patients.

Currently, dosages are calculated using desktop computing infrastructure which can be slow and time consuming. The dosage calculation relies on a method known as a Monte Carlo simulation and the accuracy and time taken for the calculation is dependent on the number of iterations that can be performed by the computing infrastructure.

Staff at QUT in the School of Physical and Chemical Sciences together with HPC staff and staff from Southern Area Radiation Oncology Service have been collaborating to solve this issue and have discovered that the use of QCIF's High Performance infrastructure will significantly increase the accuracy of the dosage calculation whilst decreasing the time required to perform the calculation.

Our project also decreases the need to take measurements on the linear accelerator - these machines are always extremely busy treating patients, so access to the linear accelerators in work time for physics measurements is extremely limited.

Outcomes

The objective of this project is to achieve better medical outcomes for Queenslanders though improved radiation oncology services within Queensland hospitals. To achieve this objective staff from Brisbane’s Princess Alexandra Hospitals Radiation Oncology Centre will leverage the High Performance Infrastructure at QUT to significantly improve the speed and accuracy of the dosage calculations for radiation oncology (cancer therapy) dosages.

Participants

Mr Mark Barry
High Performance Computing, QUT

Industry Participants

Mr John Doody
Director of Physics, SAHS Radiation Oncology
Princess Alexandra Hospital