AAPM HQ Hosts Successful 2018 IHE-RO Connectathon

IHE-RO (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise – Radiation Oncology) held its 2018 Connectathon at AAPM headquarters in September 2018. IHE-RO is a domain under the more global IHE umbrella that works to identify and solve integration problems between different computer systems in the radiation oncology arena. The IHE-RO Planning Committee, comprising physicians, physicists, and vendors, works to identify and prioritize issues in the radiation oncology process that negatively affect its effectiveness. These issues are then reviewed by the IHE-RO Technical Committee, made up of physicists and vendors, whose job is to identify potential solutions to the issue, determine if an effective solution can be made through better integration of computer systems, and, if so, develop a protocol (known as a Technical Profile) that provides that solution. Developers in the radiation oncology domain then are asked to implement these solutions and prove their applications meet the requirements of the Technical Profile in a Connectathon.

The IHE-RO Connectathon is a week-long testing session where different applications in the radiation oncology arena are tested under the watchful eyes of monitors, generally medical physicists, who evaluate the interactions between different applications and determine whether the communication between the systems meet the requirements of a Technical Profile. Systems that show they can receive information correctly from multiple vendors downstream of their application and send information to several vendors upstream of their application are acknowledged to have passed that Connectathon.

Three Integration Profiles were tested formally during the 2018 IHE-RO Connectathon. All three of these Profiles are currently in Trial Implementation status:

• Basic RT Objects-II (BRTO-II) – image segmentation, simple treatment planning, dose review
• Multi-Modality Image Registration in Radiation Oncology-III (MMRO-III) – spatial registration, registered segmentation, registered segmentation, and dose review
• Treatment Planning-Plan Content (TPPC) – plan content with multiple beam techniques

Successful results of the Connectathon are as follows:

• Accuray –
  • Passed BRTO-II
• Brainlab –
  • Passed MMRO-III
  • Passed TPPC
• RaySearch –
  • Passed BRTO-II
  • Passed MMRO-III
  • Passed TPPC
• Varian –
  • Passed BRTO-II
  • Passed MMRO-III
  • Passed TPPC
• ViewRay
  • Passed BRTO-II

Additional information on the specific actors for each vendor, application and version, and profile for the 2018 Connectathon, as well as more information about IHE-RO can be found at the following sites:

• www.aapm.org/IHERO
• www.ihe.net
• www.ihe-ro.org