ESTRO 2025 - Abstract Book

S2346

Interdisciplinary – Other

ESTRO 2025

Purpose/Objective The objective of this research is to investigate the technological development of radiation therapy devices and products across time via the interrogation of patents. A secondary question is: which countries and companies most contributed to the development of these technologies? A tertiary question is what other IPCs (i.e., technology areas) are mostly correlated to radiotherapy. Material/Methods The population of patents with priority dates between 1900 and 2020 belonging to International Patent Code (IPC) A61N 5/00 – “Radiation therapy” were downloaded as Excel files from Derwent Innovation. An algorithm was written to assign a label to each patent family (fampat). With this done, it was possible to consider inventions in the analysis, instead of individual patent documents. The algorithm then used fampats to count and produce tables and graphs with the number of publications per country, year, IPC, owner, and combinations of these. Finally, the citation network was studied using Gephi to identify the most influential inventions in radiotherapy. We calculated: network diameter, average degree, and eigenvector centrality. Based on the latter, it was possible to return to the original database and find the most influential fampats based on network metrics. Results The number of radiotherapy-related patents worldwide grew exponentially from 1960. The three other IPCs most often correlated to radiation therapy are: A61B (“Diagnosis; Surgery; Identification”), A61H (“Physical therapy apparatus”), and A61K (“Preparations for medical, dental, or toilet purposes”) (Figure 1).