From cars to cancer: UH professor employs auto industry tools for tum...(to the treatment Dong said. Unfortunat...)

Since 2000, Dong and his colleagues at M.D. Anderson have been using computerized treatment planning systems, called "intensity-modulated radiation therapy," to design highly precise dose distributions tailored to the specific shape of the tumor. For the past year, they have been designing new radiation plans that account for changes in the tumor volume and organ position in a selection of patients who are being rescanned daily.

"You can imagine there is lots of new information as you rescan a patient," Dong said. "Replanning a patient can take between three and five days. It's a big effort. Then the question becomes: Can we predict how the tumor changes based on a limited number of CT scans? Then, we can decide when to replan during the treatment course."

Treatment for a head and neck tumor depends upon the type, size and stage of the cancer, where it is located and the patient's general health.

"Radiation therapy is a compromise between treating the cancer cells and, at the same time, sparing normal cells," Dong said. "It's very easy to kill cancer by radiation, but not harming normal organs at the same time can be tricky. So, it's a delicate, fine balance."

Kamrani hopes that, based upon initial CT scan readings, the team will be able to classify tumors and predict through radiation models the various stages of their demise.

"The purpose is to create a model to show this trend, with some level of acceptable error, by looking at the initial tumor and classifying it based on these attributes," Kamrani said. "If there is a correlation, we have to figure out why there is a correlation and then create classification of tumors. So if a patient comes in, and he falls into that attribute, we can say, with some degree of accuracy, the tumor wil
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