Design of a treatment control system for a proton therapy facility

The IUCF Proton Therapy System (PTS) is designed by Indiana University and operated by the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute (MPRI) to deliver proton radiation treatment to patients with solid tumors or other diseases susceptible to radiation. PTS contains three Treatment Systems, each consisting of four subsystems: Beam Delivery, Dose Delivery, Patient Positioning and Treatment Control. These systems are implemented using different operating systems, control software, and hardware platforms. Therefore, IUCF developed an XML network communication protocol so that subsystems could issue commands to and receive feedback and status from other subsystems over a local area network (LAN). This protocol was also applied to the MPRI clinical database used to access patient treatment plans. The treatment control system was designed so that a single user interface could be used to deliver proton therapy. The use of the XML and the LAN allowed the software of the treatment control system to be designed such that the various systems are treated as objects with properties and methods. This approach not only simplified the overall design of the treatment control system, it also simplified the effort required for software validation, testing, and documentation.