Radiation Oncology Archives

TomoTherapy Inc, a Madison, Wisconsin firm behind the world’s first system that integrates CT scanning with Intensity Modulated Radiation, is reporting encouraging results from a study that looked at treatment responses in patients with non-small cell lung cancer. The tested group was exposed to escalating doses of radiation in a shorter treatment period, as the press release explains:

The paper, published in Technology in Cancer Research and Treatment (Technol Cancer Res Treat. 2008 Dec;7(6):441-8.)… evaluates a study devised to test the safety of escalating the biologically-effective tumor dose via hypofractionated treatment regimens using 25 fractions over five weeks. Traditionally, radiotherapy is delivered over six to seven weeks, or even longer (sometimes up to 10-11 weeks) if dose-escalation is the goal. A downside to dose escalation in this manner is that tumor repopulation occurs during the prolonged delivery time. Shorter dose-escalated schedules have historically been avoided because of the expectation of severe toxicities. The University of Wisconsin (UW) School of Medicine and Public Health investigators hypothesized that the conformal dose-delivery abilities of TomoTherapy, with helical IMRT and IGRT, would permit safe dose-escalation with shorter schedules, thereby limiting accelerated repopulation, and possibly improving tumor control.
According to its authors, the study demonstrates that the use of TomoTherapy technology may allow for higher doses of radiation therapy than are conventionally administered to be delivered over a shorter treatment course, with lower than expected toxicities. Helical TomoTherapy allows for delivery of image-guided, intensity-modulated radiation therapy, permitting conformal delivery of radiotherapy while minimizing the dose delivered to normal tissues.

To understand how the TomoTherapy® Hi·Art® treatment system “integrates optimized planning, image-guidance and helical delivery to provide precise, continuous radiation therapy from all angles around the patient,” check out the following company video:

Using working radiotherapy machines to train residents can be an expensive proposition. Since the devices can cost millions of dollars, time is usually optimized to stream patients through and little remains for training sessions. Vertual Ltd. out of Hull, England is providing a solution that skips over the problem by offering a virtual training simulator for a number of radiotherapy machines.
MTB Europe reports:

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The FDA has given approval to Sicel Technologies, out of Morrisville, North Carolina, to market company’s new generation of RFID radiation sensors for use during radiation therapy. The devices, which are 2 mm in diameter and 18 mm long, are injected into the tumor to send back readings to an external receiver via RFID. The new DVS-HFT dosimeter is capable of accurately measuring higher energy / shorter time radiation burst common in modern devices.
Here’s what the device can measure and transmit back:

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Ernest Lawrence, a Berkeley inventor of the cyclotron, would love to hear this story. His invention has not only enriched uranium for The Bomb, but will now be used for clinical applications.
Varian Medical Systems out of Palo Alto, California just received the European CE Mark of approval for the company’s Proton Therapy System. Maybe the largest and most expensive medical device, the 250 mega-electron volt proton accelerator requires its own building. The advantage, of course, is the ability to precisely target tumors, as protons have a much shorter and predictable range of energy delivery than photons.

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A group of physicists from Brookhaven National Laboratory have been awarded a patent for a new medical synchrotron design that promises to deliver proton beam therapy with a tighter, more precise beam using a smaller machine at lower cost.
From Brookhaven NL:

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Nucletron out of Veenendaal, The Netherlands has received FDA approval for the company’s unified system for reviewing radiotherapy plans “generated with a wide variety of DICOM-compliant treatment planning systems in a Windows (PC) environment.”
From the press release:

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