American Society for Radiation Oncology announced a partnership with American Association of Neurological Surgeons in a press release on Sunday. The partnership was created to develop a stereotactic radiosurgery patient registry.

The associations have been working on this project for two years, according to Brian Kavanagh, MD, MPH, FASTRO, chair of ASTRO's Health Policy Council, and a radiation oncologist at the University of Colorado.

"Dr. Jason Sheehan, a professor of neurosurgery at the University of Virginia, is our chief liaison with the American Association of Neurological Surgeons," Kavanagh told DOTmed News in an email. "Jason and I first connected during the 2012 ASTRO Annual Meeting in Boston, and we have had several meetings amongst our leadership and teams to develop the project in more detail. We solidified the ASTRO-AANS partnership, and secured the necessary resources. We are finalizing the remaining details to launch the project in the next few months," he said.

According to the press release, the registry will be used to identify and understand national patterns of care in radiosurgery. The information will be leveraged to help improve health care outcomes, improve decision making when it comes to care and potentially lower the cost of care.

The information will be culled over the course of the next three years from 30 high-volume sites. According to Kavanagh, it's expected that each participating center will enroll hundreds of patients per year, equating to potential database of tens of thousands of patients for this pilot phase of the registry. The registry will provide de-identified information on patients suffering from brain metastases, benign brain tumors and arteriovenous malformations that were treated with SRS.

"We are very hopeful that we will successfully enroll a solid number of patients and then be able to identify important indicators of high quality care," said Kavanagh. "Our highest priority will be to learn from the registry about how we can improve patient care and use radiosurgery to optimize patient care and outcome for a variety of conditions. We want to know which patients benefit the most from radiosurgery and which patients might need a different approach to treatment."

ASTRO and AANS will work together to lead the Scientific Advisory Committee in helping to identify and approve sites that will participate. The committee will also create a data collection and management plan as well as plans for reviewing and analyzing the data. Further, it will serve as the gatekeeper for access to the registry data and ultimately determine the method of public dissemination of the data.

The analysis of the de-identified patient data will be scientifically published and elements of the data will available in the public domain in order to inform as well as to encourage further publication and distribution.

"Ideally, the registry should become a living source of knowledge that lets us continue to learn far into the future by having access to a large database of patient care," said Kavanagh.

BrainLAB is the major sponsor of the project, with other sponsors being actively sought out.

This is not ASTRO's only partnership - the association recently teamed with The American Association of Physicists in Medicine to create the RO-ILS program (Radiation Oncology - Incident Learning System), which is a national patient safety initiative.

Stereotactic radiosurgery is a type of radiation therapy that uses a high dose of radiation - typically a single treatment - to treat a multitude of ailments. Originally developed as a non-invasive method to treat certain types of brain tumors, it has since expanded its role as has become a potential tool to treat other hard-to-reach cancers like those of the eye, spine and pituitary. It can also be used as a treatment for epilepsy and Parkinson's.