Varian Medical Systems (NYSE: VAR), a health-care technology company, has recently presented study results from numerous independent researchers highlighting the efficacy of RapidPlan, their new software for storing and accessing clinical knowledge based on best planning practices, during the American Association of Physicists in Medicine’s (AAPM) 57th Annual Meeting & Exhibition that took place in Anaheim, California July 12-16, 2015.

In a company press release about the research findings, RapidPlan is described as effectively allowing healthcare practitioners “to extract information from past clinical experience and use it to generate mathematical models that expedite the creation of new treatment plans. The software helps the planner quickly generate a new treatment plan that achieves the radiation oncologist’s tumor coverage and normal tissue sparing goals, greatly reducing the need for time-consuming, manual trial-and-error processes.”

To investigate RapidPlan’s ability to generate high quality treatment plans for the care of cervical cancer (CC) patients, researchers from Shandong Tumor Hospital, Jinan, Shandong Province, China, created a database of 20 cervical intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) treatment plans and randomly selected patients in which the software would be utilized, comparing patient outcomes. The difference in the dose-volume histograms (DVH) between the semiautomated treatment plans and the original treatment plans were evaluated. Their study, entitled, “The Feasibility of Using A Knowledge Base of Prior Treatment Plans in Cervical Cancer: A Dosimetric Comparision with Original Plans,” showed that the use of RapidPlan could improve the efficiency of the treatment planning process as well as generating feasible treatment plans. “We demonstrate a knowledge-based IMRT model in cervical cancer can generate clinically acceptable treatment plans of high quality. This semiautomated approach can improve the efficiency of the treatment planning process while ensuring that high quality plans are developed”, the authors concluded in their work.

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Uterine cervical cancer arises from the cervix and is associated with human papillomavirus (HPV) infection in more than 90% of the cases. Although this link is established, doctors still don’t understand why some women have an risk of developing this disease which is the second most common cancer worldwide. A recent systematic review and meta-analysis, a type of study that tries to aggregate all present scientific knowledge about one particular question, published in the PLOS ONE journal, gives new insights on one plausible risk factor.