Related Experiment Video
Updated: Feb 19, 2026
Author Spotlight: Improving Radiation Therapy Access with Radiation Planning Assistant
Published on: October 6, 2023
Automated customized retrieval of radiotherapy data for clinical trials, audit and research
Marina Romanchikova1, Karl Harrison2, Neil G Burnet3
11 Department of Medical Physics & Clinical Engineering, Cambridge University Hospitals , Cambridge , UK.
Objective:
To enable fast and customizable automated collection of radiotherapy (RT) data from tomotherapy storage.
Methods:
Human-readable data maps (TagMaps) were created to generate DICOM-RT (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine standard for Radiation Therapy) data from tomotherapy archives, and provided access to "hidden" information comprising delivery sinograms, positional corrections and adaptive-RT doses.
Results:
797 data sets totalling 25,000 scans were batch-exported in 31.5 h. All archived information was restored, including the data not available via commercial software. The exported data were DICOM-compliant and compatible with major commercial tools including RayStation, Pinnacle and ProSoma. The export ran without operator interventions.
Conclusion:
The TagMap method for DICOM-RT data modelling produced software that was many times faster than the vendor's solution, required minimal operator input and delivered high volumes of vendor-identical DICOM data. The approach is applicable to many clinical and research data processing scenarios and can be adapted to recover DICOM-RT data from other proprietary storage types such as Elekta, Pinnacle or ProSoma. Advances in knowledge: A novel method to translate data from proprietary storage to DICOM-RT is presented. It provides access to the data hidden in electronic archives, offers a working solution to the issues of data migration and vendor lock-in and paves the way for large-scale imaging and radiomics studies.
