Project PICTURE aims to ‘map’ treatment decisions for the first time by merging routine brain MRIs with results of surgery and radiation of hundreds of patients in 3Dvisualisation.
These brain maps describe the tumor location and also the surgery and radiation results for patient groups.
Patients with a primary brain tumor receive a combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy.
Tumors invariably recur and survival is limited. Surgery and radiotherapy are image-guided, therefore the accuracy depends mostly on the decision were to treat than on the technical execution.
This new approach of probability maps serves the quality assessment of yesterday’s therapy to guide tomorrow’s treatment.
This technique will provide a detailed quality assessment of therapeutic methods and results between care teams.
This technology will discover new patterns of disease in relation to patient outcomes, such as survival and brain functioning.
We expect that multidisciplinary decision making will improve from this standardization of quality assessment and by unlocking knowledge of international expert teams.”
A standard for quality assessment of treatment decisions in clinical neurosurgery and radiotherapy is unavailable because brain location is a complicating factor – some brain regions are more active than others.
This research project PICTURE aims to quantitate this clinical decision making for the first time. A new method will be further developed to determine the distribution of surgical and radiation oncological results in the brain in 3D maps covering many patients based on routine MRI scans.
These brain maps will demonstrate the brain locations of the tumor, resected tissue and radiation plans for patient groups. In addition, these brain maps will be used to score where postoperative vascular complications and radiotoxic effects occur, and to identify the most frequent locations of tumor recurrence.