Ask HN: Are there any open-source projects related to cancer research?

6 points·cimi_··4 comments

I worked on Prism, a radiation therapy treatment planning program. It's a physics simulation with 3D graphics and lots of data management used to customize radiation therapy treatments for each patient. It's a big system with stringent requirements for accuracy and correctness.

Some HN readers may be interested to know that Prism is written in Common Lisp. It is one of the largest and most featureful Lisp programs I know of.

For many years Prism was the sole planning system used at the University of Washington Medical Center. It is still used there for the cases that can't be handled by the commercial system they now have. It has also been used at some other medical centers, as a platform for research projects that require access to system internals -- which the commercial planning systems do not provide.

The project page is http://www.radonc.washington.edu/research/cancer-informatics...

According to that page, it is covered by the Lisp Lesser GNU Public License, LLGPL.

PS - Prism includes some separable components that could be use in applications other than radiation therapy. There are a server and client for DICOM, a network protocol for images (from CT and MRI scanners etc.) and other medical data including radiation therapy prescriptions and treatment records. There is also SLIK, a GUI toolkit for Common Lisp and X Windows.

Not exactly sure if this is what you're looking for, but it's the best I could find :P http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news-IN-Open-source-Cyber...

The NIH caBIG project site hosts a ton of such projects: http://gforge.nci.nih.gov/

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