Research IT

Improving Code to Improve Cancer Treatment

Come along to the Research IT Club on the 4th of June and find out how our Research Software Engineering team is helping UoM researchers to improve radiation treatment in cancer therapy. There will also be updates on the latest computational procurement and the latest news from across Research IT.


The event will take place at 3pm on the 4th of June in Lecture Rm E in Zochonis Building. If you would like to attend please register for the event. The full agenda is below:

Updates from the Research IT teams

  • Research Lifecycle Project (RLP)
  • Research Infrastructure
  • Research Software Engineering

Bringing Probabilistic Planning to Clinic

Eliana Vásquez Osorio, Senior Research Fellow, Division of Cancer Sciences, Faculty of Biology, Medicine and Health, The University of Manchester

Treating cancer with radiation is a balancing act between giving enough radiation dose to the tumour(s) and sparing healthy organs nearby while accounting for inevitable treatment uncertainties. Currently, these uncertainties are indirectly accounted for by extending the region around the tumour that receives a large dose. With probabilistic treatment planning (PTP), this region can be reduced by allowing the optimisation process to account for the uncertainties directly, thereby reducing the harmful radiation dose to organs nearby.

PTP has not been implemented in the clinic as it is computationally very demanding; taking an unacceptable length of time per plan. In the project we have developed with support from Research IT, we integrated research code that implements PTP into a commercially available treatment planning system. This integrated code will be further developed by a PhD student and thereby start generating evidence required to bring this advanced technique into the clinic.

The Performance Optimisation and Productivity (POP) Centre of Excellence

Jon Gibson, Technical Consultant, Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG)

The POP is a centre of excellence in HPC, providing free of charge performance optimisation and productivity services for (your) academic AND industrial code(s) in all domains.

Over the initial two and a half years of the POP Centre of Excellence, we provided 174 services to academic and industrial organisations throughout the EU, identifying and implementing improvements to the performance of their parallel codes. A further three years of this free service commenced in December 2018. This talk will discuss what this pan-European collaboration offers and present a variety of examples in which significant improvements were made to code performance.

About the Presenter

Jon Gibson is a Technical Consultant at the Numerical Algorithms Group (NAG). He has 25 years’ experience in scientific programming and has worked for two national HPC services in the UK. He is currently working on the EU Performance Optimisation and Productivity (POP) project.

Let Us Know!

If you have attended a previous Research IT club, we would be very grateful if you could complete a short survey to let us know what you think of the club and if there is anything we could do to make them even better for you!