CMS, an Elekta company, has delivered clinical treatments to three sites utilising Monaco, its next-generation Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy (IMRT) treatment planning system.
Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, have all begun producing treatment plans with the application.Featuring biological modelling, constrained optimisation, and Monte Carlo dose calculation algorithms, Monaco represents a fundamentally new approach to IMRT planning, including a sophisticated set of tools to make the Radiotherapy planning process easier, more straightforward and clinically reliable. 'The biologically-based Monaco IMRT treatment planning system produces clinically relevant plans, which are dosimetrically superior to plans from dose-based IMRT treatment planning systems, feature shorter plan delivery times, and can be easily verified with normal QA procedures,” said Moyed Miften, PhD, DABR, and Allegheny General Hospital’s chief of medical physics. “The multi-criteria optimisation and the sensitivity analysis tools in the Monaco system also help reduce the time needed to optimise IMRT plans.' While IMRT delivers significant improvements for radiation treatment, the technology presents challenges, including managing the time and resource intensive processes associated with planning. With Monaco, CMS offers new approaches that improve IMRT planning in the following ways: Sensitivity Analysis tool that minimises trial-and-error by guiding the decision making process Smart Sequencing, a constrained aperture optimisation that produces efficient step-and-shoot segments Biological models, voxel definition controls, and multi-criterial goals that provide more intuitive and direct control over the optimisation process. Monaco was developed with the University of Tubingen in Germany. Markus Alber, PhD, and colleagues developed the Hyperion project, which is the engine behind the new Monaco system. CMS commercialised these innovative concepts and approaches from the Hyperion project to create the foundation for Monaco. The result is an advanced, clinically sophisticated IMRT planning system backed by the core research and capabilities of one of the world’s leading research institutions.
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