The SWAN Project team were amongst the first internationally to instigate collation of digital radiotherapy treatment planning data from multi-centre clinical trials. This has enabled the group to develop the processes for assessing the quality of planning in trials, and for associating aspects of the data (including the assessment of its quality) to the outcomes for trial participants. The systems developed by the group have been used to support multiple clinical trials and are now used for broad outcomes analysis using complex three-dimensional information regarding radiotherapy dose, patient anatomy and organ function.

The SWAN Project is developing methods to associated the spatial distribution of radiotherapy dose delivery to the outcomes observed in clinical trial participants. This approach is looking to the next generation of radiotherapy treatment planning systems that can accommodate highly diverse descriptions of dose-toxicity and dose-efficacy relationships, and radiotherapy dose delivery systems that can enable high flexibility in customising the spatial and temporal distributions of radiation dose.

See this Presentation to the Bangladesh Medical Physics Society, September 2020.

Current radiotherapy approaches utilise a process of delineation to segment individual parts of anatomy (i.e. create "structures") as a guide to treatment planning. The SWAN Project is investigating methods of guiding planning without the need for this segmentation step, describing individual "voxels" describing the patient via likelihoods of being a part of any particular organ. This approach should account for the significant uncertainties associated with that segmentation process, provide a more accurate account of the relationship between radiotherapy dose and the effect of that dose, and enable a very sophisticated approach to describing and planning the radiation dose history for an individual patient.

The SWAN Project is involved in assessing the use of advanced tracers for positron emission tomography (PET) imaging for guiding the treatment of adult glioma. As part of a national trial, imaging for trial participants treated nationally will be collated together with radiotherapy treatment planning data for the same patients in order to assess the impact of the imaging on the radiotherapy treatment and, subsequently, on the outcomes for the study participants. The project is supporting the TROG 18.06 "FIG" trial.

In a program of research led from the University of Sydney and involving a collaboration spanning Australia and New Zealand, multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is being used to characterise cancer within a patient. This process will enable cancer spatial distributions to be "mapped", indicate the spatial characteristics of the disease in any new patient and correlate with molecular characteristics. The SWAN Project team is using that information to investigate how that mapping can be used to focus the radiotherapy dose for a patient, in a process known as "Biofocussed RadioTherapy" (BiRT).  This approach will enable an increase in dose to those parts of the tumour at most risk of recurrence, and a reduction of dose to healthy tissue at risk of radiation injury.