ART-Plan, a breakthrough software solution developed by TheraPanacea, will ultimately comprise five modules. Three are now available on the European market (and two in the United States) to assist doctors and physicians in planning radiotherapy protocols for cancer patients. ART-Plan is used in the image contouring, multimodal image registration and assistance stages of the MRI-guided radiotherapy process.
Thus, thanks to artificial intelligence, the French company established in 2017 has filled a gap in the market. “Today, we have highly technologically advanced treatment machines offering variable-speed and variable-energy radiation, the possibility to match radiation beams to the shape of the tumour, real-time imaging at every radiation session, and so on. But what we don’t have is software that produces radiotherapy plans. It can’t fully exploit the potential of this cutting-edge technology to optimise treatments,” explains Operations Manager and co-founder Catherine Martineau-Huynh.
Of course, the aim of any radiotherapy plan is to protect healthy organs and focus the beams onto the tumour. The forty or so European centres that already use ART-Plan have reported time savings of more than 90%, and a standard of quality equal to or greater than that achieved by human operators during the stages covered by the software.
“We aim to deliver automated, adaptive radiotherapy standardised to a high level, which will enable users to calculate the best and most appropriate treatment plan for every patient, every day”, Catherine Martineau-Huynh, Operations Manager and co-founder.
The partnership between TheraPanacea and DYN’r Medical Systems should facilitate and accelerate its distribution in the United States. The French radiotherapy distributor and manufacturer has been operating there for more than thirty years. It has over 150 customers worldwide. The goal is to convert around twenty American centres to ART-Plan, as of next year.
AI-powered solutions are also very interesting for developing markets, where there is a shortage of skilled labour. Two centres, in Senegal and Togo, are already using the software suite.
