Background
Many US combat personnel have sustained nervous tissue trauma during service, which causes Neuropathic pain that is difficult to manage. In select patients, synapse lesioning can provide significant pain control. Our goal is to determine the effectiveness of using Proton Beam radiotherapy for treating spinal cord injury (SCI) related neuropathic pain as an alternative to invasive surgical lesioning. The research is a joint collaboration of USC, Spinal Cord Institute VA Healthcare System, Long Beach, and Loma Linda University.
This is the first system of its kind that integrates preclinical data, from animal studies and research related human studies, on one web-based platform with standardized DICOM data objects. It supports integration and standardization of imaging informatics data in DICOM format; clinical evaluation forms outcomes data and treatment planning data from the Treatment planning station (TPS) utilized to administer the radiation dose in DICOM-RT format. In addition, it supports evaluation of SCI subjects for recruitment into the clinical study, which includes the development, and integration of digital forms and tools for automatic subject evaluation and classification of SCI pain as well as a rules-based decision tree.
