EU - Go-Smart - A Generic Open-end Simulation Environment for Minimally Invasive Cancer Treatment

The Go-Smart project will build a generic open-source software simulation environment for planning of image guided percutaneous Minimally Invasive Cancer Treatment (MICT). MICT includes radiofrequency ablation (RFA), cryoablation, microwave ablation (MW), transarterial chemoembolisation (TACE), brachytherapy (BT), and prospectively, irreversible electroporation (IRE). Beside of TACE each type of MICT uses needles that are inserted into the tumour tissue and the tissue is destroyed through heating, cooling, and application of an electric field or radiation. These treatments are often combined with TACE. The commonalities between the different procedures allow for the development of a generic, reusable, robust simulation environment with the relevant physics and physiology needed to correctly predict the result of MICT in terms of lesion size and shape. The environment will incorporate patient data and appropriate physiological models to simulate tissue response to heat, cooling, hypoxia, radiation, or electrical pulses. The models will account for multi-scale physiological dependencies between a full organ, its anatomical structures and tissue properties down to the cellular level. The software environment will be open-ended with extendable interfaces to allow clinicians to add further patient data collected before, during and after MICTs. This data will be used by the research community to refine the existing physiological tissue models thus transforming the environment into a user-driven growing info-structure. The Go-Smart environment will allow the Interventional Radiologists (IR) to select an optimal type of MICT by simulating the personalised result of the different treatments and medical protocols in patient specific conditions. Bringing different MICTs into a unified simulation environment is a unique approach and will promote their systematic comparison and establish much needed common standards and protocols for MICT in Europe.