The Main Event
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Getting it together
14.53 PDT Sunday: The ASTRO meeting trade exhibition opened its doors this morning with a tuneful fanfare courtesy of the University of Southern California’s marching band - the acoustics of the registration hall ensuring that the horn section was able to deliver an amplified wake-up call to red-eyed delegates (your correspondent included) with that fuzzy, jetlagged feeling.
A few hours in and Sunday’s headline theme out on the show floor looks to be vendor partnership. First out of the blocks were IBA, the Belgian specialist in particle-therapy systems, and Elekta, the Swedish radiotherapy equipment maker.
The two companies announced a tie-up called the Global Particle Therapy Programme, which aims “to optimize the seamless integration of proton-therapy delivery and information management systems within the radiation oncology environment”.
On the Elekta side, this can include an array of Elekta products such as the MOSAIQ workflow management and information system, MOSAIQ proton-therapy module, patient immobilization devices, localization systems, as well as the Elekta Synergy IMRT and IGRT delivery system. On the IBA side, the agreement includes the Proteus proton-therapy system, with the option to add more products in the future depending on customer requirements. Significantly, as well as joint development work, the two companies announced joint sales and marketing activities in this area.
Another one getting with the programme, so to speak, is CMS, the St Louis, MO-based vendor of treatment-planning and workflow-management products. Under the terms of its agreement with IBA, CMS has committed to provide particle-therapy solutions for a range of clinical requirements. This will include XiO, a treatment-planning platform for photon, electron and proton therapy; the Focal line of distributed planning workstations; and the CMS Direct suite of planning infrastructure and workflow-management products.
Not to be outdone, one of IBA’s rivals in the proton-therapy market, Optivus Proton Therapy (San Bernardino, CA), announced a collaboration of its own: a joint venture with Parsons Commercial Technology Group, a division of Parsons Corporation, to build turnkey proton-therapy centres.
Founded in 1944, Parsons bills itself as “one of the largest, 100% employee-owned management, engineering and construction companies in the US”. Optivus, for its part, was founded by the engineers who designed and installed the world’s first hospital-based proton-therapy centre, at Loma Linda University Medical Center (Loma Linda, CA) in October 1990.
Also this morning, Varian Medical Systems (Palo Alto, CA) and Envisioneering Medical Technologies (St Louis, MO) announced that they are partnering to improve low-dose-rate (LDR) brachytherapy prostate-cancer treatments. Envisioneering is to configure its TargetScan, a prostate-cancer diagnostic and treatment system featuring 3D ultrasound and a stationary probe, to work with Varian’s VariSeed brachytherapy treatment-planning software.
Ted Jackson, Varian’s chief developer of the VariSeed software, claimed: “We can now automatically transport 3D prostate ultrasound images into our VariSeed system to plan and assess where seeds are placed and know with certainty how effectively the gland was treated. This represents the next evolution in prostate cancer treatment delivery and planning.”
TargetScan’s 3D imaging capability is designed to help physicians more effectively gather the gland’s dimensions to calculate and monitor seed implantation. Its fixed probe “eliminates the time and costs associated with traditional systems and their digital stepper technology, which physically moves the ultrasound probe within the patient”.
I’ll be posting more reports from the exhibition throughout the week, including the low-down on Rapid Arc, Varian’s big launch here at ASTRO. I’ll also be revealing what’s behind the big blue curtain on the Accuray booth. I did ask earlier but they said that if they told me they’d have to kill me; the big unveiling is scheduled for 11 a.m. tomorrow.
