byst: A novel workflow-based software for adaptive radiation therapy
In adaptive radiation therapy (ART), newly acquired image data and available data from former fractions need to be carefully analyzed to evaluate the current treatment progress and take the right decision. There is a necessity to organize and automatically process the overwhelming amount of data for usage in clinical routine. Besides this fact, more than one adaptive workflow is imaginable. Thus, lot of research has to be done in order to develop adaptive workflows.
It is worthwhile to build those workflows upon a solid software base in order to reuse, optimize and compare the created workflows. In comparison to solutions that rely on scripting or batch file processing, this approach is more persistent. Furthermore, it has the potential to be used for building standalone applications for each use case / workflow. This could be a reliable and reproducible approach to translate research work into clinical routine.
We present byst, a dedicated application designed for ART, based on MITK functionality which allows the user to create data processing pipelines (workflows) for ART via a graphical user interface (GUI).