School of Computing, Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada.
Med Phys. 2012 Oct;39(10):6332-8. doi: 10.1118/1.4754659.
Interest in adaptive radiation therapy research is constantly growing, but software tools available for researchers are mostly either expensive, closed proprietary applications, or free open-source packages with limited scope, extensibility, reliability, or user support. To address these limitations, we propose SlicerRT, a customizable, free, and open-source radiation therapy research toolkit. SlicerRT aspires to be an open-source toolkit for RT research, providing fast computations, convenient workflows for researchers, and a general image-guided therapy infrastructure to assist clinical translation of experimental therapeutic approaches. It is a medium into which RT researchers can integrate their methods and algorithms, and conduct comparative testing.
SlicerRT was implemented as an extension for the widely used 3D Slicer medical image visualization and analysis application platform. SlicerRT provides functionality specifically designed for radiation therapy research, in addition to the powerful tools that 3D Slicer offers for visualization, registration, segmentation, and data management. The feature set of SlicerRT was defined through consensus discussions with a large pool of RT researchers, including both radiation oncologists and medical physicists. The development processes used were similar to those of 3D Slicer to ensure software quality. Standardized mechanisms of 3D Slicer were applied for documentation, distribution, and user support. The testing and validation environment was configured to automatically launch a regression test upon each software change and to perform comparison with ground truth results provided by other RT applications.
Modules have been created for importing and loading DICOM-RT data, computing and displaying dose volume histograms, creating accumulated dose volumes, comparing dose volumes, and visualizing isodose lines and surfaces. The effectiveness of using 3D Slicer with the proposed SlicerRT extension for radiation therapy research was demonstrated on multiple use cases.
A new open-source software toolkit has been developed for radiation therapy research. SlicerRT can import treatment plans from various sources into 3D Slicer for visualization, analysis, comparison, and processing. The provided algorithms are extensively tested and they are accessible through a convenient graphical user interface as well as a flexible application programming interface.
人们对适应性放射治疗研究的兴趣日益浓厚，但可供研究人员使用的软件工具要么价格昂贵，是专有的封闭应用程序，要么是免费的开源软件包，但范围、可扩展性、可靠性或用户支持有限。为了解决这些限制，我们提出了 SlicerRT，这是一个可定制的、免费的、开源的放射治疗研究工具包。SlicerRT 旨在成为放射治疗研究的开源工具包，为研究人员提供快速计算、方便的工作流程以及通用的图像引导治疗基础设施，以协助实验治疗方法的临床转化。它是一个 RT 研究人员可以将他们的方法和算法集成到其中，并进行比较测试的媒介。
SlicerRT 作为广泛使用的 3D Slicer 医学图像可视化和分析应用平台的扩展实现。SlicerRT 提供了专门为放射治疗研究设计的功能，除此之外 3D Slicer 还提供了用于可视化、配准、分割和数据管理的强大工具。SlicerRT 的功能集是通过与大量放射治疗研究人员（包括放射肿瘤学家和医学物理学家）进行共识讨论来定义的。使用与 3D Slicer 类似的开发过程来确保软件质量。应用 3D Slicer 的标准化机制进行文档编制、分发和用户支持。测试和验证环境配置为在每次软件更改时自动启动回归测试，并与其他 RT 应用程序提供的真实结果进行比较。
创建了用于导入和加载 DICOM-RT 数据、计算和显示剂量体积直方图、创建累积剂量体积、比较剂量体积以及可视化等剂量线和曲面的模块。通过在多个用例中使用 3D Slicer 和建议的 SlicerRT 扩展进行放射治疗研究，证明了其有效性。
开发了一种新的用于放射治疗研究的开源软件工具包。SlicerRT 可以将来自各种来源的治疗计划导入 3D Slicer 进行可视化、分析、比较和处理。提供的算法经过广泛测试，可通过方便的图形用户界面以及灵活的应用程序编程接口访问。
