Abstract
Purpose: Open Radiological Archiving and Communication System(ORACS) relational research database, which stores images, projections, plans, trials and doses etc, is the backbone for Image Guided Adaptive Radiation Therapy (IGART) Research Project at VCU. Philips Pinnacle3 is being used by this project for IGART adaptive planning of Virtual Clinical Trials (VCT). Therefore, in order to establish a user‐friendly interactive environment and facilitate collaboration between different sub‐projects, seamless integration of these two systems will be a must. Methods: It is well‐known that Pinnacle3 lacks the capacity to interact with a database server. However, we take advantage of Pinnacle's configurability and scripting power to enhance Pinnacle with new GUI controls, which invoke a middleware layer to access ORACS database. Users can import images from ORACS database through remote web services or locally, and save contours and plans and doses and other derived Pinnacle data back to ORACS database by simply clicking these new GUI controls. Moreover, a Pinnacle database can be re‐created easily and entirely from ORACS database through these new GUI controls and the middleware layer. The same technique can be used to create connection between Pinnacle3 and other database servers. Also because ORACS database uses web services for data access, if a specific middleware is created, any Treatment Planning System can access ORACS database interactively. Results: We presented a software infrastructure for seamless integration of ORACS research database and Philips Pinnacle3, which created an integrated virtual clinical trial environment for IGART researchers at our institution. Conclusions: Contemporary IGART research imposes new demands on the IT infrastructure of Radiation Oncology departments. We created a data management system which takes first steps towards managing new and complex tasks of automated analysis of large data sets.
NIH Grant P01 CA11602
