The objective of this research is to develop algorithms and software for treatment planning in intensity modulated radiation therapy under assumption of tumor and healthy organs motion. The current approach to addressing tumor motion in radiation therapy is to treat it as a problem and not as a therapeutic opportunity. However, it is possible that during tumor and healthy organs motion the tumor is better exposed for treatment, allowing for the prescribed dose treatment of the tumor (target) while reducing the exposure of healthy organs to radiation. The approach is to treat tumor and healthy organs motion as an opportunity to improve the treatment outcome, rather than as an obstacle that needs to be overcome. Intellectual Merit: The leading intellectual merit of this proposal is to develop treatment planning and delivery algorithms for motion-optimized intensity modulated radiation therapy that exploit differential organ motion to provide a dose distribution that surpasses the static case. This work will show that the proposed motion-optimized IMRT treatment planning paradigm provides superior dose distributions when compared to current state-of-the art motion management protocols. Broader Impact: Successful completion of the project will mark a major step for clinical applications of intensity modulated radiation therapy and will help to improve the quality of life of many cancer patients. The results could be integrated within existing devices and could be used for training of students and practitioners. The visualization software for dose accumulation could be used to train medical students in radiation therapy treatment planning.

This project aims to achieve key technology, infrastructure, and regulatory science advances for next generation medical systems based on the concept of medical application platforms (MAPs). A MAP is a safety/security-critical real-time computing platform for: (a) integrating heterogeneous devices and medical IT systems, (b) hosting application programs ("apps") that provide medical utility through the ability to both acquire information and update/control integrated devices, IT systems, and displays. The project will develop formal architectural and behavioral specification languages for defining MAPs, with a focus on techniques that enable compositional reasoning about MAP component interoperability and safety. These formal languages will include an extensible property language to enable the specification of real-time, quality-of-service, and attributes specific to medical contexts that can be leveraged by code generation, testing, and verification tools. The project will work closely with a synergistic team of clinicians, device industry partners, regulators, and medical device interoperability and safety standard organizations to develop an open source MAP innovation platform to enable key stakeholders within the nation's health care ecosphere to identify, prototype, and evaluate solutions to key technology and regulatory challenges that must be overcome to develop a commodity market of regulated MAP components. Because MAPs provide pre-built certified infrastructure and building blocks for rapidly developing multi-device medical applications, this research has the potential to usher in a new paradigm of medical system that significantly increases the pace of innovation, lowers development costs, enables new functionality by aggregating multiple devices into a system of systems, and achieves greater system safety.

The objective of this research is to address issues related to the platform revolution leading to a third generation of networked control systems. The approach is to address four fundamental issues: (i) How to provide delay guarantees over communication networks to support networked control? (ii) How to synchronize clocks over networks so as to enable consistent and timely control actions? (iii) What is an appropriate architecture to support mechanisms for reliable yet flexible control system design? (iv) How to provide cross-domains proofs of proper performance in both cyber and physical domains? Intellectual Merit: Currently neither theory nor networking protocols provide solutions for communication with delay constraints. Coordination by time is fundamental to the next generation of event-cum-time-driven systems that cyber-physical systems constitute. Managing delays and timing in architecture is fundamental for cyberphysical systems. Broader Impact: Process, aerospace, and automotive industries rely critically on feedback control loops. Any platform revolution will have major consequences. Enabling control over networks will give rise to new large scale applications, e.g., the grand challenge of developing zero-fatality highway systems, by networking cars traveling on a highway. This research will train graduate students on this new technology of networked control. The Convergence Lab (i) has employed minority undergraduate students, including a Ron McNair Scholar, as well as other undergraduate and high school researchers, (ii) hosts hundreds of high/middle/elementary school students annually in Engineering Open House. The research results will be presented at conferences and published in open literature.

This project, investigating formal languages as a general methodology for task transfer between distinct cyber-physical systems such as humans and robots, aims to expand the science of cyber physical systems by developing Motion Grammars that will enable task transfer between distinct systems. Formal languages are tools for encoding, describing and transferring structured knowledge. In natural language, the latter process is called communication. Similarly, we will develop a formal language through which arbitrary cyber-physical systems communicate tasks via structured actions. This investigation of Motion Grammars will contribute to the science of human cognition and the engineering of cyber-physical algorithms. By observing human activities during manipulation we will develop a novel class of hybrid control algorithms based on linguistic representations of task execution. These algorithms will broaden the capabilities of man-made systems and provide the infrastructure for motion transfer between humans, robots and broader systems in a generic context. Furthermore, the representation in a rigorous grammatical context will enable formal verification and validation in future work. Broader Impacts: The proposed research has direct applications to new solutions for manufacturing, medical treatments such as surgery, logistics and food processing. In turn, each of these areas has a significant impact on the efficiency and convenience of our daily lives. The PIs serve as coordinators of graduate/undergraduate programs and mentors to community schools. In order to guarantee that women and minorities have a significant role in the research, the PIs will annually invite K-12 students from Atlanta schools with primarily African American populations to the laboratories. One-day robot classes will be conducted that engage students in the excitement of hands-on science by interactively using lab equipment to transfer their manipulation skills to a robot arm.