Collaborations

Water flow optimisation

Industry partner: Melbourne Water
Research partners: Professor Mark Wallace, Dr Guido Tack and Dr Ilankaikone Senthooran

Melbourne Water supplies drinking and recycled water, and manages the city’s water supply catchments, sewage treatment, rivers, creeks and major drainage systems. It also oversees a complex network of storage reservoirs, tunnels, aqueducts and bulk water-transfer pipelines.

Careful planning is required to deliver optimal water distribution strategies that account for many factors such as minimising operating costs while maximising water storage.

We have developed a scenario-based interactive optimisation tool which can account for multi-year demand forecasts and incorporate potential drought-response actions based on modelled storage levels. The tool offers the flexibility to modify the underlying network configuration to represent asset management or system improvement actions.

This will enable rapid and interactive evaluation of different plans for diverse operating scenarios – fast-tracking decision-making.

Cancer radiation

Industry partners: Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre, Alfred Health, University of Sydney Faculty of Physics and Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Western Australia
Research partners: Dr John Betts and Dr Guido Tack

One of the greatest challenges in cancer radiation therapy is treatment dose planning. This involves carefully identifying the locations to be treated and the dosage to be delivered at each. The planner must administer a sufficient dose while ensuring minimal impact on surrounding tissue.

It takes an experienced clinician approximately one hour to plan the treatment for prostate cancer brachytherapy.

Working with clinicians and researchers at major cancer research hospitals, radiation physicists and image processing specialists, we have developed software to help treatment plan preparation.

Using a 3D model of a patient’s prostate created from MRI data, our software produces a feasible treatment plan in less than a minute. As well as high computational speed, the tool also enables more sophisticated planning than what can be achieved manually.

This results in plans that deliver high radiation doses to parts of the prostate where tumours have been detected while also reducing the radiation dose received by sensitive surrounding tissue.