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More from the exhibit hall
17:07 Monday CT: As I was continuing my quest for interesting exhibitor news this morning I was drawn to the large contraption on show at the Zeiss (Dublin, CA) booth. I wrote about the company’s IntraBeam intraoperative radiotherapy (IORT) system earlier this year (see Where physics meets surgery on medicalphysicsweb), but this was the first time I had actually seen it in the flesh. To my journalist’s eyes it certainly looked to be an impressive piece of kit.
The stand was being manned by a fellow Brit - and a researcher at that. Marinos Metaxas of University College London Hospital (London, UK) - which played a large part in the development of IntraBeam and was the first institution to use it clinically - is so impressed by the results he has seen with the system that he’s willing to stand at the Zeiss booth and extol its virtues to passing delegates (and the odd journalist) himself.
IORT describes a system of radiation therapy whereby immediately after a tumour is resected, a single dose of radiation is delivered directly to the tumour bed using a special applicator. This has several advantages for both patient and clinic because it is over in a single session, rather than requiring treatment over several weeks as is the case with conventional external-beam radiotherapy.
IntraBeam is currently being used in a multi-institution long-term clinical trial for breast-cancer patients. This is only half complete at the moment, but according to Metaxas the results are extremely encouraging. All patients are currently still disease-free, with the first being treated five years ago. We’ll have to wait until 2009, however, to see if this is confirmed by the full statistical analysis.
Other exhibitor news:
• Standard Imaging (Middleton, WI) has added new features to its BeamChecker Plus QA system that enable the product to be used with TomoTherapy machines. The vendor is also showcasing two brand new phantoms: the QCkV-1, which is apparently the only system available that is capable of doing quantitative tests on kV imagers; and the stereotactic dose verification (SDV) phantom. The latter is a blue block that combines the necessary equipment for pretty much every test you could want to do on a stereotactic radiation-therapy system - or does it? Any QC physicists who have checked out the new SDV phantom, feel free to chime in using our commenting tool.
• North American Scientific (Chatsworth, CA) has just launched its breast brachytherapy system ClearPath, which is intended to be used after a lumpectomy. It features a unique system of expanding catheters that enables clinicians to produce a dose that conforms to the shape of the tumour bed without creating hotspots in surrounding healthy tissue. Exective vice president and CTO Michael Cutrer also told me that this is the only conformal breast brachytherapy system with the ability to do both high-dose-rate and low-dose-rate treatments.
