Research Summary
Dr. McNutt’s primary research goal is to create a medical environment that allows clinicians to measure how well they perform clinically for their patients. This requires incorporating medical IT infrastructure into the clinical setting and using it to measure the patient experience and quantify it for analysis and trending and feedback.
In the last five years, he has spent a great deal of effort integrating structured data collection into the clinical environment. This involves establishing workflows and user and software interfaces that enable the clinician to interact with the patients with minimal interaction with the computer. The primary focus of the work is to establish a database that allows efficient access to clinical data to look at toxicity and outcome trends and how they correlate with delivered radiation dosimetry.
Dr. McNutt and his team have also built a shape relationship-based model of patient similarity that allows them to look at prior radiation oncology patient treatment plans to determine the expected plan quality of a new patient. This model is shared with the broader EMR database model in that they used a database of prior experience to guide the treatment course for new patients. In addition, he has worked to accelerate the treatment planning process by automating planning techniques and developing a GPU-based dose computation algorithm for external beam radiation therapy.
Selected Publications
Jacques R, Wong J, Taylor R, McNutt T. “Real-time dose computation: GPU-accelerated source modeling and superposition/convolution.” Med Phys. 2011 Jan;38(1):294-305.
Ricchetti F, Wu B, McNutt T, Wong J, Forastiere A, Marur S, Starmer H, Sanguineti G. “Volumetric change of selected organs at risk during IMRT for oropharyngeal cancer.” Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys. 2011 May 1;80(1):161-8. doi: 10.1016/j.ijrobp.2010.01.071. Epub 2010 Nov 19.
Hobbs RF, McNutt T, Baechler S, He B, Esaias CE, Frey EC, Loeb DM, Wahl RL, Shokek O, Sgouros G. “A treatment planning method for sequentially combining radiopharmaceutical therapy and external radiation therapy.” Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys. 2011 Jul 15;80(4):1256-62. doi: 10.1016/j.ijrobp.2010.08.022. Epub 2010 Oct 13.
Clemente S, Wu B, Sanguineti G, Fusco V, Ricchetti F, Wong J, McNutt T. “SmartArc-based volumetric modulated arc therapy for oropharyngeal cancer: a dosimetric comparison with both intensity-modulated radiation therapy and helical tomotherapy.” Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys. 2011 Jul 15;80(4):1248-55. doi: 10.1016/j.ijrobp.2010.08.007. Epub 2010 Oct 13.
McNutt T, Wong J, Purdy J, Valicenti R, DeWeese T. “OncoSpace: A new paradigm for clinical research and decision support in radiation oncology.” Proceedings of the XVIth Int’l Conf on Computers in Radiotherapy. 2010 June 1.
