Project description
Cancer treatment with a personalised approach
External-beam radiotherapy is a widely used cancer treatment, but current methods for treatment planning do not consider the unique microstructural and biological characteristics of each patient. Many models are based on in vitro studies, missing the complexity of real-life conditions. The ERC-funded MINIONS project aims to overcome these limitations by developing a new modellistic framework for personalised radiotherapy. This approach utilises clinically compatible, patient-specific models to accurately describe the microscopic characteristics of individual tumours and their interactions with radiation. By creating tailored microstructural and radiobiological models, the MINIONS project seeks to improve treatment outcomes. This innovative approach includes advanced imaging techniques and multi-scale simulations accelerated through AI towards biologically guided treatments, offering a more targeted and effective approach to cancer care.
Objective
External-beam radiotherapy has been established as best practice care in different cancer cases, although current models applied in the clinics to tune the treatment plan dosimetry, as a function of the expected tumour response and radiation-induced toxicity, do not make use of patient-specific information, but rely on radiobiological parameters typically derived from in-vitro experiments, thus abdicating from describing the in-vivo complexity of the pathology. MINIONS is a cutting-edge research programme that investigates and integrates a set of activities to implement patient-specific microstructural and radiobiological models in personalized radiotherapy treatment planning and adaptation towards a detailed description of tumour characteristics of each patient and thus significantly improved tumour control probability. The main challenge of MINIONS is to create, for the first time, a real-time patient-specific model able to describe the microscopic characteristic of the tumour and its interaction with the radiation beam. The scientific activities of MINIONS are to achieve and merge: (i) Monte-Carlo (MC) simulations of Diffusion Magnetic Resonance (DW-MR) signals and radiation-tissue interactions on a library of in-silico cellular substrates to obtain an integrated simulation platform; (ii) real-time Artificial Intelligence-based techniques to accelerate MC simulations and make them compatible with fast treatment planning and adaptation; (ii) advanced DW-MR imaging, to retrieve non-invasively the information required to feed the simulation platform for the implementation of patient-specific microstructural and radiobiological models. The design of in-vivo and ex-vivo tests allows validating the model performance and the collaboration of researchers, engineers and clinicians will drive the use of this innovative strategy in clinical routine, to increase survival and quality of life for a wide range of cancer patients.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- social sciencesmedia and communicationsgraphic design
- medical and health sciencesclinical medicineoncology
- medical and health sciencesbasic medicinepathology
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC GrantsHost institution
20133 Milano
Italy