An overview of the PROSECCA project
Up to half of prostate cancer patients receive radiotherapy as part of their treatment and, although it is effective at destroying cancerous lesions deep within the body, this comes at the cost of damaging healthy, or normal, tissues. With 78% of prostate cancer patients surviving for 10 years or more, limiting life-changing side effects for the one in three patients left with post-radiotherapy bladder or bowel function changes that will significantly affect their quality of life is extremely important. The key to this is personalising an individual’s radiotherapy treatment; in other words rather than assuming that all tumours respond similarly to radiotherapy, the treatment is optimised for the individual. To date, approaches to do this have been restricted to small numbers of carefully selected patients, are inordinately expensive and are unsuitable for rolling out into everyday practice across the NHS. The PROSECCA study (Improving radiotherapy in PROState cancer using EleCtronic population-based healthCAre data) is investigating an alternative approach for this using AI to reveal information deep within a patient’s medical history that indicates how well they will respond to radiotherapy. The project is supported by Prostate Cancer UK and the Movember Foundation through grant MA-CT20-010, Major Awards in Curative Treatments (October 2022 – October 2027). The project team has over 40 members including physicists, oncologists, radiographers and data scientists, and a very active patient and public involvement group.
To access the full article as a pdf please sign up to our newsletter.
The content on this page is provided by the individuals concerned and does not represent the views or opinions of RAD Magazine.
