The postdoc will be assigned to work package 4 of this project. Different radiotherapy-specific tools will be developed that enable the management of DICOM RT data in TraIT. Furthermore, tools will be developed that can be used by the associated radiotherapy departments within secured workspaces in the TraIT environment to evaluate and improve the quality of photon and proton therapy treatment plans and contoured structures. More specifically:
1. Development of tools that can be used in the secured workspaces offered via TraIT, in close collaboration with the IT expert working in the same work package:
- Tools for DICOM RT data management in the TraIT infrastructure
- Tools for the evaluation of radiotherapy treatment plans
- Tools for (deformable) image registration for RT-specific data
- Contouring atlases to enable automatic generation of contours in 3D medical images used for radiotherapy treatment planning.
2. Design and execution on research projects related to these topics.

- Excellent researcher with PhD in (Applied) Physics, Technical Medicine, Biomedical Engineering or related discipline
- Experienced in programming preferably in Java, Python and Bash
- Experience with radiotherapy specific data (DICOM-RT) and XNAT is a pre
- Excellent team player, thorough in documentation, clear in communication.
- Affinity with open source software in general and highly motivated to contribute to open source software for medical research
- Affinity with research and medicine
- Fluent in English and/or Dutch

The UMCG has a preventive Hepatitis B policy. You may be required to build up sufficient protection against Hepatitis B before you can be appointed. Vaccination is provided by the UMCG if necessary.

Maximum hours per week: 36. Your salary dependent on qualifications and work experience up to a maximum of € 4.216,- (scale 10) gross per month for a full-time position. In addition, the UMCG will offer you 8% holiday pay, an 8.3% end-of-year bonus and a development budget. The terms of employment comply with the Collective Labour Agreement for Medical Centers (CAO-UMC).

More information
For more information please contact:
- Dr. Ir. N.M. Sijtsema, medical physicist and work package leader in ProTRAIT, phone (050) 361 36 74 (secretariat), e-mail: n.m.sijtsema@umcg.nl
- Prof. dr. J.A. Langendijk, chair of the department of Radiation Oncology, UMCG and project leader of ProTRAIT, phone (050) 361 5532 (secretariat), e-mail: j.a.langendijk@umcg.nl
(please do not use e-mailadresses for appliciations).

department of Radiation Oncology

Postdoc for the development of ProTRAIT, an National Advanced IT infrastructure to support the clinical introduction of Proton Therapy in the Netherlands.

The department of Radiation Oncology at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) build a unique multi-disciplinary research environment in Groningen in which different research aspects of radiation physics, biology, imaging, big-data analysis, and therapy are integrated. At this moment, a facility dedicated for proton therapy (the Groningen Proton Therapy Center (GPTC)) is under commisioning at the campus of UMCG, which is expected to start patient treatment at the end of 2017.
On the national level, UMCG collaborates with other proton therapy initiatives in Maastricht (ZonPTC), Delft (HollandPTC) and Amsterdam (APTC), and with other (university) hospitals (MAASTRO, NKI/AVL, AMC, VUMC, LUMC, ErasmusMC, UMCU, UMCNRadboud and the Maxima Center in Utrecht) on the introduction of proton therapy.

ProTRAIT
Recently, UMCG and MAASTRO, received a grant from the Dutch Cancer Society to set up a nationwide Proton Therapy Research IT Infrastructure (ProTRAIT). ProTRAIT is an advanced IT infrastructure that can streamline the use of clinical parameters, the assessment of radiation-induced complications and Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) at a national level, and provides numerous opportunities to link these parameters to 3D dose distributions. ProTRAIT, will fully support the so-called model-based approach, an evidence-based methodology to select patients for proton therapy and to clinically validate the added value of protons compared to photons.
In ProTRAIT, a Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) data infrastructure for both clinical and 3D image and 3D dose information will be developed and deployed for proton therapy in the Netherlands. The infrastructure will make available prospective, standardized, multicentric data from all Dutch proton and a representative group of photon therapy patients.
For this project we are looking for a postdoc for the development of an advanced infrastructure and tools for the storage and handling and application of radiotherapy specific 3D imaging, dose, (non)rigid registration and contouring information (DICOM and DICOM-RT). The ProTRAIT infrastructure will be fully integrated within the existing TraIT infrastructure (www.ctmm-trait.nl).