October 18, 2019 — The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Varian announced a new strategic collaboration to develop an integrated software platform to streamline review of radiation oncology treatment plans.
The goal of the platform is to establish an efficient framework to connect participating sites to a central database, allowing MD Anderson physicians to host collaborative review sessions around treatment plans and to communicate plan changes back to physicians. As the platform matures, it has the potential to be deployed at all MD Anderson locations and across MD Anderson Cancer Network.
“Radiation oncology is a highly technical specialty that relies on the interoperability of a variety of hardware and software components,” said Albert Koong, M.D., Ph.D., professor and division head of radiation oncology at MD Anderson. “We believe the development of this unified platform with Varian will enable expansion of our radiation oncology quality standards to provide the best available care to more patients.”
Watch the VIDEO: Walk Around of a Varian Identify Image-guided Patient Positioning System
MD Anderson Cancer Network, a program of MD Anderson Cancer Center, collaborates with community hospitals and healthcare systems around the globe to provide higher quality and advanced care to patients in the communities in which they live.
In addition to the software platform, the partnership will work to develop evidence-based tools to improve the analysis of various quality measures, with a focus on:
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Minimizing the volume of radiation dose distributed to nearby healthy organs, resulting in fewer side effects for patients;
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Automating the comparison of treatment plans to MD Anderson and national quality criteria, enabling the development of new standard value and safety metrics; and
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Decreasing the time needed to review radiation treatment plans, improving efficiency and expanding access.
For more information: www.varian.com, www.mdanderson.org
May 15, 2025 
