Goal

There exist several frameworks for review of RT objects and statistical modeling. These frameworks seldom work in harmony when researchers are faced with the challenge of building a cohort of treatment plans with outcomes for statistical modeling. The use of multiple tools require massaging the data and thorough quality assurance which consume time and human resources. Moreover, there are no review tools which help visualize a cohort of patients with pre-defined anatomical structures and doses at once. The Extractor tool builds on CERR framework to address the problem of fusing DVH and outcomes data for statistical modeling by providing (1) Graphical environment to review a cohort of patients. (2) Tools to standardize structure names. (3) Extraction of dose volume parameters. (4) Storage of data extracted from the selected cohort as native Matlab, Excel or sql database objects. This simplified environment for cohort review and evaluation would encourage researchers to share data and validate models using datasets from multiple institutions.

Graphical environment to review a cohort of patients

The figure below shows the user interface. The GUI consists of 6 tabs where each tab corresponds to a particular workflow step.

• STEP 1: User chooses directory containing Tx plans
• STEP 2: User types in the structure names for DVH extraction
• STEP 3: User manually corrects structure names that do not match the search criteria
• STEP 4: COHORT REVIEW
• STEP 5: Choose Excel file containing outcomes / clinical data
• STEP 6: Export Tx, outcomes and clinical information to the required format such as DREES, csv.

Standardization of structure names

This tab shows the available structure names per plan along with the structure name of interest. The tool tries to find the matching structure name with regular expression match. The user can manually pick the correct structure name in case no match (or multiple matches) is found as per the search criteria. The user can visualize the plan to look at the structures overlaid on CT and dose by clicking the "View this Plan" button.

Cohort Review

Cohort review helps quality assure the doses and structures data for the group of plans selected by the user. The figures below show selection of plans for cohort review along with the visualization of doses and structures for the entire cohort.