Interactive Radiotherapy Planning for Students (IRPS)
Medipex helped create an online space and licensing model for this innovative radiotherapy planning platform, allow the product to be marketed internationally.
The clinical need
With current training in radiotherapy planning there is a gap between the tracing paper, hand-planning approach, and the current clinical systems, which may prevent trainees from getting a good feel for physical dose distribution.
The innovation challenge
The inventors developed an interactive computer-based software package that teaches the basic principles of planning external beam radiotherapy treatments and includes interactive examples. IRPS (Interactive Radiotherapy Planning for Students) presents patient outlines and guides users towards producing a clinically acceptable dose distribution. It also allows a supervisor to remotely monitor students as they work through prepared course content online. The team needed help with rolling this out for use in other organisations, including understanding the sale routes and licensing requirements.
How did Medipex help?
Medipex created an online space to provide information about the product and to enable expressions of interest in it. This helped to market IRPS to an international market. Medipex also developed a suitable software licensing model appropriate for multiple customers and users.
Impact
IRPS has now been used clinically at Weston Park for over 20 years and has been sold to many hundreds of individuals, medical physics departments and schools of radiography, both in the UK and internationally.
Purchase the software or download a demo
To purchase a copy of the IRPS software, please email Clare Steele-Childe. A demo version of the IRPS software is also available to download free of charge below.
Installing the demo version
With most web browsers, when you click on the download link above, you can either ‘Run’ the IRPS installation programme, or ‘Save target as…’ and download it. You might prefer to ‘Save target as…’ if you want to try out IRPS on a different computer. When you run the IRPS installation programme, you will be asked for a location on your hard disk where the IRPS software is to be installed, defaulting to C:\Program Files\IRPS\ .If you just want to try IRPS on your local computer, you should choose to install both the IRPS client and the IRPS server software from the next dialog. Follow the remaining pages of the installation dialog, and that's it. You're ready to run IRPS.
Logging on to IRPS for the first time
Initially, you must log in to IRPS with the user name ‘supervisor’, and password ‘irps’ (not case-sensitive – don't include the apostrophes). In supervisor mode, you can allocate the user slots to named IRPS users, and give the users a default password. When you've added a user, log off, and log on to IRPS again, this time with the user name and password you have just allocated.
Using IRPS
Refer to the user manual (dowload from the link above), for a brief introduction to IRPS. When a fully licensed version of IRPS is purchased, a ‘Supervisors Manual’ is made available in electronic form which includes detailed instructions about installation, use, and the supervision features of the software.