Nuclear Medicine

Nuclear medicine has the intrinsic potential of allowing pre- and post-therapeutic in vivo biodistribution analysis for the diagnosis and follow-up of the disease as well as to perform Molecular RadioTherapy (MRT) treatments using radionuclides.

To help Molecular Imaging processing and MRT optimization in clinical routine, since 2007, DOSIsoft has been leveraging its expertise in Imaging, Radiation Oncology Dosimetry and digital software technologies, to advance Nuclear Medicine for oncology and treatment.

Innovations in this field are bound to play an increasing and tremendous role, for the benefits of patients first, cancer centers, and the whole biotechnology industry. Impacts and benefits will be throughout the full cycle, from diagnosis to patient post treatment follow-up with tools to:

• Better characterize disease;
• Optimize and personalize therapy for a given patient; Improve safety and minimize side effects or impacts on healthy organs for MRT;
• Control “in vivo” the treatment;
• Quantify patient post-treatment response;
• Characterize patients responding to a given therapy and
• Increase traceability.

Such software technologies are the keys to move away from the one-size-fits-all standard protocols towards a truly personalized medicine of the future. Nuclear Medicine and the expanding MRT domain will first inherit from the tremendous advances performed during the last 20 years in External Beam Radiation Therapy and then accelerate to include AI-powered Theranostics features.

PLANET^® software suite was developed to address these needs.

In recent years, the market for theranostics has been growing steadily driven in particular by companion diagnostic therapies. The number and range of radiotherapeutics available has expanded significantly. Many new diagnostic and therapeutic agents are in development or in early phase of clinical trials. These will provide new treatment options for many cancers, particularly following unsuccessful treatments with conventional  approaches or relapse and will have a significant impact on the costs of healthcare.

Considered as a promising and quickly expanding set of therapeutic options for treating many cancer cases, the increment of MRT applications has brought the attention of both the scientific community and the institutional bodies to the need for planning and verification of the absorbed dose delivered to individual patients, as is currently standard practice in External Beam RadioTherapy (EBRT). In this context the recent European legislation (Council Directive 2013/59 Euratom, 6 February 2018) mandates that also MRT treatments should be planned according to the radiation doses delivered to individual patients, as it is the case for EBRT. The directive also specifies that verification of the radiation doses delivered should be performed.

It represents a challenge especially for radionuclide treatments given systemically, whose bio distribution and ultimate targeting is greatly heterogeneous among individuals and whose therapeutic effect is exerted over a long period of time (days or weeks in many cases, depending on both biological and physical properties of the radiopharmaceuticals).