U of W student coder creates software program for CancerCare
Taylor Hanson wrote a complex code that does work the doctors used to do
Some may have taken off to cabins or partied on patios, but one University of Winnipeg student spent her summer coding a program for CancerCare.
Taylor Hanson, 22, wrote a software program that helps doctors do a quality control check on the radiation therapy that patients with prostate cancer receive. Hanson was working at CancerCare on a student award to do research in the medical physics area.
"It sounds super cool what I did, but ultimately, you're in a basement coding all day. That's kind of the bulk of what physics is putting into the medical program," said Hanson, an honours physics student in her fourth year at the U of W.
Her work targeted the prostate gland — the walnut-sized organ in men below the bladder and in front of the rectum— and the location of three tiny metal seeds, called fiducial markers, which are implanted into the prostate gland before therapy to help technicians see it, and target tumours.
But the prostate gland can move, said Hanson, so two sets of imaging are gathered prior to the patient's radiation treatment.
Then, two more sets of images are taken just before treatment, which, when combined with the previous set, helps the radiation therapist position the patient for the radiation.
After therapy, doctors review the distance between the fiducial markers on both sets of imaging for 28 doses, or 'fractions' of treatment that the patient received, to make sure the markers match, or match within an acceptable range, to ensure the treatment was well placed.
Summer Goals
"It turned out to be super time consuming," said Hanson, adding that doctors had to review the data for every fraction of treatment for every patient. She said for that reason, they reduced the number of fractions they'd review from 28 to two.
"My goal this summer then was to automate this image-matching process to save the physicians time; rather my code will run on all the patient data," she said.
Hanson developed a code that pulls the values from the system, does some math, makes some transformations from 3D to 2D values and computes the difference between all 28 sets of fiducial marker values. And voila — a program that instantly does what used to take doctors a lot of time.
A spokesperson for CancerCare says the software isn't yet up and running but they look forward to implementing it clinically soon.
When the code finally did what she wanted it to do, it was a 'Eureka' moment for Hanson.
"It was super exciting! There was a lot of ups and downs, there was one problem I remember being stuck on for weeks. With coding it's usually a smallest little thing, it's very finicky," said Hanson.
Hanson is one of two recipients this year for the University of Winnipeg's Sir William Stephenson Scholarship, an award that recognizes a student's leadership and capacity to contribute to Canada. Hanson will likely never meet the cancer patients whose data she pored over for four months, but for their sake, she didn't give up.
"It's a lot of typing and numbers and weird symbols but at the end of the day, it does something."