Chairs: Ana Maria Barragan Montero (Belgium), Joshua Mason ((United Kingdom), Niklas Wahl (Germany)
Scope / Short description: The workshop aims to discuss ideas and approaches to improve open-source development and resource sharing in radiotherapy. The focus will be on open-source software and scripting although the potential for sharing other developmental resources such as planning techniques and protocols will be explored.
Audience: The workshop is targeted to anyone creating software or scripts for research or clinical radiotherapy applications, and particularly open-source software developers and users.
Proposed Outcomes:
- Develop an ESTRO registry/resource for software and scripts
- Establishing a focus- / workgroup on “Sustainable software and resource sharing” to advise on funding, collaborating, and maintaining the registry
- A white paper / recommendation paper on guidelines, best practices and challenges.
- Strategy for dissemination (e.g. to National Societies)
Detailed description:
The modern radiotherapy treatment chain relies on software, both for research and clinical applications. Proprietary medical software forces researchers to develop their own in-house software, as it is usually not possible to access and modify source code. Clinical departments develop end-user-scripts to interface and connect applications for similar treatments across limited vendor systems. Many radiotherapy physics departments are undertaking such similar developments independently from each other, often limited from sharing workflows and data through bilateral research agreements. Licensing costs further discourage research of technologies not available at specific centers (e.g., particle therapy). This redundancy wastes valuable time, duplicates and limits research efforts, and ultimately detracts from potential patient benefits.
The workshop thus aims to discuss ideas and approaches to improve open-source development and resource sharing in radiotherapy. The focus will be on open-source software and scripting although the potential for sharing other developmental resources such as planning techniques and protocols will be explored. Thus, we invite anyone creating software or scripts for research or clinical radiotherapy applications, and particularly open-source software developers and users.
Potential topics of the workshop include:
- Discussing, reviewing & documenting the state-of-the-art in open-source software and resource sharing.
- Which software projects are known and used?
- How are researchers and medical physicists using, sharing and contributing? What are they missing?
- How are user communities organized (vendor-specific / professional organizations)?
- Visibility, usage and development of open-source and resource sharing initiative
Besides the big processing platforms like Slicer or MITK, the radiotherapy software landscape is scattered. Freely available Monte Carlo projects as well as bigger treatment planning tools often have an established user-base, but few active contributors.
- How do we boost visibility and usage?
- How do small developments (“papers with code”, AI models) factor in?
- Do we need something like software, workflow and resource registries (e.g., within ESTRO?) to collect developments?
- How can we encourage sharing of clinical scripts, workflows, etc.?
- Administration of open software and resources
- What can we learn from other disciplines?
- Which barriers, both technical and in terms of regulation/governance, may restrict open source development and resource sharing across ESTRO members?
- How to license open source software?
Despite the great flexibility, transparency, and rapidly increasing usage of such tools in research, there is no overarching initiative or community within the radiotherapy field. Many within the radiotherapy medical physics community still consider open source as a byproduct of research instead of open-source software driving and shaping research itself. Translation into clinical workflows is just a matter of time and raises questions in this heavily regulated environment
We believe that by bringing the various open-source groups together at an ESTRO physics workshop, we can create a strong community within ESTRO that discusses and addresses potentials and challenges in sharing our resources and software, advises professional and research communities, and suggests guidelines on how open-source solutions in radiotherapy can drive research, clinical practice and foster innovation responsibly with safe benefit for patients in the future.
On this occassion, we have prepared this survey to get to know what are the thoughts of the community about open-source and resource sharing in radiotherapy. In addition, one of the potential outputs of the workshop is to develop a registry/resource for open-source software and scripts. Help us to get to know all the open-source and sharing initiatives that are out there!