The Main Event
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Streamlined thinking on treatment planning
17.35 Sunday CT: As the loudspeakers announced the opening of the AAPM Annual Meeting’s trade exhibition, and the attendees flooded onto the show floor, the first booth to catch my eye was that of Varian Medical Systems (Palo Alto, CA), not least because all the Varian staff were adorned with rather large, brightly flashing badges.
Closer inspection revealed that the badges were promoting the company’s new “Smart Segmentation” radiotherapy treatment planning tool. So I went along to find out what all the fuss (and the flashing lights) was about.
According to Robin Reddick, Varian’s product manager for treatment planning systems, Smart Segmentation can significantly reduce the amount of time needed to create treatment plans for intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) and image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT). And it does this by taking a large chunk of the work out of the user’s hands.
Smart Segmentation performs the contouring process (identifying the anatomy and any tumours) automatically. It detects the patient’s orientation and gender, plus the region of anatomy being scanned, and then draws outlines on the CT images that define the body parts and target lesions.
Defining contours is one of the most time-consuming tasks in radiotherapy treatment planning. Reddick says that the software does 80% of this work, and then the clinician can review the contours and adjust them as they see fit. “It’s about applying human input at the time when it’s the most valuable,” he explained to me.
“IMRT is critically dependent on defining everything that you want to hit and everything that you want to miss,” Reddick added. “If you don’t draw it on, then you can’t control the dose to it.”
Workflow efficiency is also a headline theme on the TomoTherapy booth. The Madison, WI company claims that StatRT, a new software package for its Hi•Art treatment system, enables the entire radiation-therapy process - from CT scanning to treatment delivery - to be completed in as little as 30 minutes.
“In one slot, we acquire a CT scan, use it for treatment planning and optimization, and do the treatment delivery, while the patient’s still in the room,” TomoTherapy’s CEO Frederick Robertson explained to me, adding that this process usually takes over a day to complete.
The reason that StatRT can do all this lies in the unique design of TomoTherapy’s Hi•Art product, which combines CT guidance and IMRT in one system. The entire process is also managed from a single computer. “An integrated system dramatically streamlines the workflow process, and therefore dramatically reduces the time requirement,” Robertson explained.
• One final note. On passing by IBA’s booth, I noticed that - despite the trade show starting today - the Belgian particle-therapy company is still keeping some things under wraps. According to IBA, a big news announcement (and what’s under that cover) will be revealed first thing tomorrow morning.Watch this space…
