Washington University School of MedicineAdvanced Technology Consortium

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About the ATC

The Advanced Technology QA Center (ATCTM) provides a robust Quality Assurance process to collect, review, and analyze image-based planning and verification data for patients enrolled on oncology group trials. The ATCTM derives its history from the the Image Guided Therapy QA Center (ITC) at WU, formerly part of the NCI U24 ATC grant. It has developed an informatics infrastructure and quality assurance process to support the submission, review, and analysis of volumetric imaging and treatment planning data for multi-institutional radiotherapy clinical trials. In this role, the ATCTM has performed the following functions:
  1. Collect digital imaging, treatment planning, and verification data for several cooperative groups,
  2. Perform Digital Data Integrity Quality Assurance (DDIQA) on clinical trials protocol case data and credentialing data,
  3. Provide online remote review facilities for QA evaluation of protocol data, and
  4. Coordinate the development of IT infrastructure for advanced technology clinical trials data management and review.
Over the past 20 years, ATCTM has led efforts to develop tools and processes to assure reliable exchange of radiotherapy treatment planning data. As a result, complete, volumetric datasets have been captured for over 20,000 patients on NCI trials for evaluation of protocol compliance and linkage to clinical outcomes. The ATCTM continues to support NCI funded trials as part of the MGH and MD Anderson U19 (2U19CA021239 subaward 225395), a contract with MGH Proton Center federal share support, and the MGH PARTIQoL trial (NCT01617161). The ATCTM has also served as the core lab for a pivotal trial of the Augmenix SpaceOAR. product, involving analysis of multiple plans, imaging modalities, and time points. The ATCTM participated in the ACR QRRO Prostate Brachytherapy Survey, supporting collection of treatment planning data and performing dosimetric analysis of treatment plans. [Zelefsky MJ, et al., Results from the Quality Research in Radiation Oncology (QRRO) survey: Evaluation of dosimetric outcomes for low-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy. Brachytherapy, 2012, PMID: 22819388]