In chartering the future of radiation oncology services with the use of artificial intelligence, RadPhysics Services LLC is collaborating closely with Virginia Tech Arlington Innovation Center (AIC), NC State University (NCSU), and MedStar Health. Medical errors frequently occur in cancer treatments during the patient preparation and treatment delivery steps. Our work is focused on developing a prototype model to reduce these errors and improve patient safety. In this effort, our team is diligently working to create a statistical error propagation model that predicts when/where errors occur in treating cancer by using modern high dimensional methods to capture the complex dynamics of how errors propagate. We believe creating a artificial intelligence (AI)-based analytical/machine learning (ML) framework can measurably help reduce medical errors that cause clinical inefficiencies, workflow bottlenecks, regulatory infractions, and patient harm.
We have a strong coalition working together to solve this problem. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) is a renowned public, land-grant, and research university with a main campus in Blacksburg, Virginia, educational facilities in six regions statewide, and study-abroad programs. The university’s research expenditures rank it in the top 5 percent of more than 900 research universities and colleges. Virginia Tech’s AIC: Health Research provides excellent research expertise and experience in developing novel AI/ML-based diagnostic radiology and radiation oncology products for commercialization.
NCSU is nationally recognized leader in science and technology located in the Research Triangle (Triangle) region. The Department of Statistics at NCSU, founded by renowned statistician Gertrude Cox in 1941, is one of the oldest and largest programs in statistics or biostatistics the country. The variety of research interests in AI and ML offers regular opportunities for interactions and ideas exchange that would be beneficial specifically for development of our prototype statistical error propagation model.
MedStar Health operates more than 120 entities, including ten hospitals, the MedStar Health Research Institute, 20 other health-related organizations and more than 100 care sites in the Baltimore–Washington metropolitan area. MedStar Health is the largest provider of healthcare in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan area. Within MedStar Health, the MedStar Institute for Innovation (MI2) is world renowned for catalyzing innovation that advances health. The environment at MedStar Health is excellent for advancing patient safety initiatives such as our proposed novel, prototype product in radiation oncology.
Sources: https://aic.dcarea.vt.edu/arlington-innovation-center0.html, https://statistics.sciences.ncsu.edu/, https://www.medstarhealth.org/
