Professor Tom Eade
Data-driven approach to radiation oncology Fifteen years ago, when Professor Tom Eade began working at Royal North Shore Hospital
effects of radiation treatment, an area of particular interest to the radiation therapy community. “It’s quite hard for most clinicians to report because if you cure a patient, they don’t tend to turn up after five years and obviously, if you haven’t cured them, then it’s sometimes hard to work out what was the cancer and what was the radiation treatment,” said Tom. With a strong database, the department can more easily enrol patients in multicentre studies and run their own in-house research. Recent successes include completing a 500-patient prostate cancer study comparing treatment durations, and a breast cancer study focused on shorter fractionation periods for radiation therapy. Tom says there is very little strong clinical trial data on how to do palliative radiation well, but the departmenthas nearly completed one study and is halfway through another. “We’ve really moved towards having studies which use a lot of patient reports about how they think things went, rather than historically where the clinician would grade outcomes and say whether it’s good or bad,” he said. Tom has seen huge changes in radiation oncology in the last 20 years, often connected to technological shifts. RNSH’s focus on data-driven studies, combined with robust research in the basic sciences, aims to push the boundaries of radiation oncology in a structured, evidence-based manner.
(RNSH) as a radiation oncologist, he was eager to set up a solid system to collect patient data for research. He’d been inspired by the approach to cancer research he’d seen during his fellowship in the United States. “There was a lot of interest in collecting clinical trial data and evidence-based practice,” he said. Today, the department boasts a sophisticated system that helps doctors and highly skilled staff run a range of pioneering studies to improve cancer treatment and patient outcomes. A focused approach to collecting patient data means doctors and staff can run real- time audits of the approximately 1,000 patients treated at the centre each year. “We use the data to help understand where we need to do better for our patients, which educates us in future trial design, and which studies we should recruit to,” he said. Aside from running data-driven studies, Tom says the department also has a long history of being strong in the technical aspects of cancer treatments due to ongoing basic scientific research. “We’re getting better imaging of the cancer, and we’ve got better technology for delivering and planning the radiation,” he said. The data collected at RNSH encompasses not just cancer outcomes but also the side
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