The Main Event
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It’s all about the QA
17:30 Sunday CT. This year’s exhibit features about 130 companies. As well as the usual suspects, such as Varian, Elekta and Siemens, this includes a host of smaller names. My mission for today was to chat to a few of these medium-sized companies. After an afternoon spent traipsing the aisles, partaking of the free food and drink, and grilling a selection of exhibitors, here’s what I have to report:
• Resonant Medical (Montreal, Canada) is previewing version 2.0 of its Restitu ultrasound-based IGRT system. Restitu enables clinicians to verify that a tumour is in the expected position before they commence treatment and, if necessary, to make adjustments to their set-up. The current version can only be used for prostate, bladder and gynaecological tumours.
Version 2.0 will also be suitable for breast cancers and, according to Mark Broeders, Resonant’s director of marketing, it will be the only system suitable for verifying electron-boost treatments as well as conventional X-ray treatments. He also claims that Restitu 2.0 will be quicker than its predecessor, but that’s all he’ll say for now. The official launch is scheduled for the ASTRO annual meeting in LA in November.
• It’s only been a year since Morrisville, NC-based company Sicel Technologies got FDA approval for its implantable dosimeter-based product DVS (Dose Verification System). Since then, things have been moving forward on several fronts. At the heart of DVS are tiny electronic gadgets that can be implanted into a patient’s tumour. These devices can serve as fiducial markers for IGRT, and can also record the exact dose received by the tumour.
At the moment, the system is calibrated to work with 6-8 MeV photons, but in the next couple of months the company expects to bring out versions suitable for high-dose-rate (HDR) brachytherapy, hypofractionated radiation therapy and electron treatments. Sicel clinical specialist Connie Childress told me that the company is also developing a version of DVS that can measure the temperature of a tumour, and how much of a chemotherapy drug it has taken up.
• If lasers are your thing then LAP (Boca Raton, FL) has a couple of brand new products on show. Its Galaxy patient-alignment system, which was launched today, maps the entire body and checks patient position by comparing this map to the images used for treatment planning. Vice-president Trent van Arkel reckons that not only is Galaxy more accurate than previous systems (which only measure the position of three points on the body), it is also fast and user-friendly.
LAP has also redesigned its 3D simulation lasers. The new system won’t be available to buy for another year, but there’s one on show at the booth. New features include a new, lighter profile; wireless Bluetooth communication between the lasers; and a single tablet PC interface.
• The sponsor of the 5k “fun” run (check back on Tuesday to hear about how that goes) Gammex (Middleton, WI) has a new neonatal phantom on show, which is due to go on sale by the end of the year. Assessing and limiting the radiation dose to children from medical imaging and therapy is particularly important, as it could cause late effects long in the future. Gammex claims that this is the first product of its kind.
