Author Spotlight: Improving Radiation Therapy Access with Radiation Planning Assistant

We have developed the Radiation Planning Assistant as a web-based tool intended to help low and middle income countries scale their efforts to provide high quality contouring and treatment planning for patients. Access to radiotherapy is very limited in most places in the world, and that's due to multiple factors including shortage of staff and qualified radiation oncologists, therapy radiographer and medical physicists. And what we hope for the RPA is to address some of these challenges.

The Radiation Planning Assistant has been designed to provide high quality contours and the plans at a minimal cost. Our hope is to provide access to those tools for free for clinics who would not otherwise have access. Now that we have finished version 1 of the Radiation Planning Assistant, we will start to develop the next versions.

We will try to reduce the need for manual upload and download of data and add new treatment sites and approaches.