Shown here is an early radiation therapy planning system developed at MIT by Professors Roger E. Kaufman and Richard Sidell

In a joint project with the Joint Center for Radiation Therapy, Beth Israel Hospital, Deaconness Hospital, and Lahey Clinic, Professor Seidel and I developed a prototype interactive system for planning therapy treatments using a computer-controlled megavoltage radiation therapy machine. This work was done in the early '70's in a project we had with the National Cancer Institute.

Here are some shots showing Dick Sidell using the data tablet to specify the fields for a bladder treatment. The computer is then synthesizing the dosage needed to produce the desired isodose contours and to keep the exposure to radiosensitive structures to a minimum.

Here you see the resulting isodose contours in the tumor. The doctor can move the slider on the side of the screen to scan through all the different dosage levels. If radiosensitive structures, such as the kidneys, were treated beyond a threshold level, the computer would signal the doctor and the beams could be repositioned. Touching the stylus to a point on the patient instantly generated the isodose contour through that point.

Much of the code and the concepts for dynamic treatment synthesis techniques which we used for this project came directly out of the work I had done on my KINSYN computer system.