Announcing the Elekta Contouring Academy

What is the Elekta Contouring Academy?

Elekta and the MR-Linac Consortium are proud to announce the first launch of the Elekta Contouring Academy, which is a library of interactive contouring exercises offered free to the world.

The ultimate purpose of the Elekta Contouring Academy is pure and clear:

The goal is to help perfect the skills of users – whether that be radiation oncologists, radiographers or dosimetrists – in CT and MR delineation of GTVs and OARs, which will significantly contribute to better clinical outcomes for patients.
Anna Britten, MD
Director, Global Medical Managers and Global Clinical Consortia,
Office of Medical Affairs at Elekta

Methods and Technology

Imaging Modalities and Expert Contours

The Elekta Contouring Academy will focus not just on computed tomography (CT), but also magnetic resonance (MR) imaging. Both are key inputs to anatomy contouring, and the latter is becoming increasingly important due to the growth of MR simulation as well as MR-guided radiation therapy.

Clinical experts from the various Tumor Site Groups (TSG) in the Elekta MR-Linac Consortium work together to build reference anatomy contours for a multitude of unique CT and MR image sets. The TSG teams include radiation oncologists, physicists and radiation therapists who work collaboratively to advance the field.

Cloud-Based Software for Contouring and Analysis

Once the reference contours are created across the example image sets, they are configured as individual learning exercises in the online Quality System for Contouring.

For those who are not familiar with the quality system for contouring, you can visit here to see how to get started. The basic steps are these:

• View instructions and access anatomy-specific educational materials on the Background Tab.
• Use the online contouring module on the Contour and Score tab to create your contours (from anywhere, with no special software necessary) and then quantitatively compare them to the reference contours created by the teams of experts.
• Repeat the exercise as often as you want for practice on the Redo and Practice tab.
• Check out the anonymized Population Results that include usach interactive analytics as histograms of comparison metrics, structure volumes, and navigable 3D consensus views. Feel free to visit back whenever and as often as you wish, as the population results will obviously grow over time!

Once again, the Elekta Contouring Academy’s educational library is currently provided to all who have (or create) a free user account on the online system. Just sign in, go to Contouring Accuracy on the main menu, then in the Select Organization field, select “Elekta Contouring Academy.”

The Library of Contouring Exercises

The Initial Library (April 2020)

The inaugural library focuses on contouring the targets for bladder and prostate cancer. There are 40 different exercises in total: 10 prostate (CT), 10 prostate (MR), 10 bladder CTV (CT), and 10 bladder CTV (MR). These are particularly interesting because they will help us all learn how variation and accuracy compare on CT vs. MR across a multitude of observers.

Future Additions

The Elekta Contouring Academy library will be growing over time as the TSGs continue to meet and create more educational case studies.