AR in Radiotherapy

Our work on developing an Augmented Reality tool to aid Radiotherapy set up has been accepted for an Oral presentation at the International Conference on the use of Computers in Radiation Therapy (ICCR) 2016. The conference will take place in London in June, jointly organised bu the University of Oxford and The Institute of Cancer Research. Francesco Cosentino is working on this project for his PhD, and will be giving the presentation.

To assist radiotherapy treatment set-up, we built an augmented reality application for widely available hand held consumer tablet devices using the Unity3D (Unity Technologies, 5.0) development platform and the VuforiaTM (PTC) AR library. The application runs on Apple iPads® and iPhones®, IOS 8.1, and above.

The device camera (iSight 5MP, f/2.4 aperture) continuously displays the real world scene at patient radiotherapy set up, including a marker that provides the reference point and real world coordinate system for virtual content that is generated at the treatment planning stage. The application reads surface information from outlines defined on a planning CT scan and contained in DICOM files generated by the Eclipse (Varian, 13.0) planning system. The magnification is adjusted with viewing distance and the application allows to toggle on and off computer graphics renderings of structures and adjust transparency, colour and illumination as required.

This project is in collaboration with the North Wales Cancer Treatment Centre at Glan Clwyd Hospital.