A University of Winnipeg (U of W) student used her time during the summer to create software that helps doctors perform a quality control check on the radiation therapy prostate cancer patients receive, according to a university press release.
Taylor Hanson, a fourth-year physics student, said she was employed by CancerCare Manitoba, where she worked with Dr. Ryan Rivest, a medical physicist on the code.
While she said the project was not her idea, she said she was lucky enough to be able to help Rivest.
She said her work focused on the prostate gland in men and the location of fiducial markers, which are small metal seeds.
Hanson said these seeds are implanted into the prostate gland before radiation therapy, so technicians are able to easily target tumours.
Radiation therapy works by destroying cancer and damaging a cancer cell’s DNA so that it stops dividing and growing.
It works by either shrinking the size of the tumour or completely destroying it, according to the Canadian Cancer Society website. Sets of images are taken of the tumour before treatment for patients, which helps the radiation therapist position the patient for radiation. After therapy, doctors are able to view these images to ensure the placement of the seed is done well.
Although she said developing the code was time consuming for her, for doctors, this code has helped to save a lot of time.
According to the university press release, the program outputs all the necessary data to a text file quickly and if something goes wrong, it gets flagged.
According to the Canadian Cancer Society, prostate cancer is the third most common cancer among Canadian men, and is the third leading cause of death from cancer in men. It is also estimated that about one in seven Canadian men will develop prostate cancer during their lifetime.
Although treatment is improving and the mortality rate for prostate cancer has been declining since the late 1990s, approximately 4,100 men died from prostate cancer in 2017, representing 10 per cent of all cancer deaths in men for that year, according to the Canadian Cancer Society.
Hanson said she spent four months in the summer developing the code. She said coding is always “finicky.”
“You have to be very careful that you understand exactly what your program is doing along the way so as to not have unrealistic numbers coming out,” she said.
Hanson’s work has earned her the Sir William Stephenson Scholarship worth $7,500, according to the U of W website.
The scholarship is awarded to students who “demonstrate outstanding achievement, superior leadership qualities on or off campus, and the potential to make a valuable contribution to Canada.”
According to the press release, doctors will start to officially use her software in the months to come.
Photo by Serena Halani
