Sustainable development of the open source radiotherapy dose calculation and optimization toolkit matRad

• Applicant: Dr. Niklas Wahl
• Subject Area: Medical Physics, Biomedical Technology ; Software Engineering and Programming Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 443188743

Treatment planning for radiotherapy is a heavily computerized process which relies on commercial and in-house developed proprietary software. The resulting inaccessibility of source code and irreproducibility of results among different centers aggravates research efforts at the core of the underlying physical simulation and numerical optimization algorithms. So far, there has been little initiative to address this situation with open source software projects.During the last years, the Department for Medical Physics in Radiation Oncology at the German Cancer Research center bundled its research efforts in radiation therapy treatment planning to form matRad, an open source toolkit for radiotherapy treatment planning. Since 2015, matRad proved useful not only for in-house and collaborative research projects but also in the context of education and science communication. With the proposed research project, we want to elevate matRad from its prototype stage to a well-established full-grown software and seize its potential to fill the gap of missing open source software for dose calculation and plan optimization in computational medical physics. Therefore, adequate sustainability measures regarding software design and development infrastructure will be implemented, complemented by targeted efforts for supporting and managing a growing community.To enable long-term sustainable development of the matRad software toolkit for radiotherapy research, education and communication, we specifically apply for funding for developing staff, for the necessary hard- and software infrastructure, and for the organization of two crowdsourcing software development workshops. A dedicated developer can tackle software and infrastructure developments on a professional level with support from experienced in-house personnel. Based on dedicated project management infrastructure together with automated unit-testing and building, the developer can also manage and support internal and external contributions as well as research projects. The workshops thereby serve the purpose to promote community involvement, i.e., both introducing and supporting (potential) matRad users hands-on in a condensed environment, as well as actively seeking for feedback on the current and future development roadmap. With the support of the German Research Foundation, matRad can become the first reliable software toolkit to facilitate reproducible in-depth radiotherapy planning research and education without depending on the financial and methodological limitations of proprietary medical software. With the appropriate seed funding matRad will generate sufficient involvement of the computational medical physics community at the German Cancer Research Center, in Germany, and beyond in order to sustain long-term development beyond the three year funding period.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigators: Dr. Simone Barthold-Bess; Dr. Ralf Floca