Megan Barrell

Research

Barrell M, Abbott N, Adams R, Hawkins M, Sebag-Montefiore D, Millin A, et al. OC-0420 Assessing plan quality in the “PLATO anal cancer trial 5” pilot phase with automated planning. Radiother Oncol 2023;182:S322–3. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-8140(23)08592-4

Thesis

Improving Radiotherapy Plan Quality Through Auditing With Automated Planning

Creating radiotherapy treatment plans is a manual, complex and technical process which results in large plan quality variations. Treatment success is highly dependent on plan quality, and so improving plan quality and decreasing variation could improve patient outcomes and reduce side effects both during and after treatment.

There is strong evidence that a meaningful variation in plan quality exists both within and between radiotherapy centres. At present there is no established and effective method to objectively audit plan quality within the UK.

Automated planning is a recent radiotherapy innovation, where computer algorithms create high quality plans quickly and consistently. This study aims to implement a new audit approach, where clinical plans are compared against automatically generated baseline plans to objectively measure plan quality. The study will trial this audit approach on 120 prostate and 120 anal cancer patients across 6 centres. Results and quality improvement opportunities will be shared with the participants, with the expectation this will lead to meaningful improvements in radiotherapy plan quality.

The success of these initiatives will be evaluated by repeating the audit after 6-12 months and comparing to previous results. 

Biography

Professional memberships

HCPC 2022 - current

Supervisors

Emiliano Spezi

Professor in Medical Engineering