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Austrian Medical Center upgrades cancer patient care with high-resolution MLC
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Elekta
: 20 June, 2012 (Application Story) |
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Physicians at SALK and Paracelsus Medical University in Austria are beginning to use the new Agility 160-leaf multileaf collimator (MLC) which only required a quick upgrade to their existing Elekta Synergylinear accelerator. |
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The system treated 33 patients on its first day in operation.
In its first month of Agility use, the centre now treats 50 patients per day, comprising about 700 individual treatment sessions that have benefited from this breakthrough in cancer care.
Based on their experience, clinicians at the Salzburg clinic report that the Agility MLC's new design provides them with more precise dose sculpting capabilities and remarkably lower non-therapeutic radiation dose delivered to the patient.
"Looking closely at several prostate cancer cases, we've calculated a measurable improvement in dose shaping precision with Agility's high-resolution, five millimetre leaves," said Felix Sedlmayer, MD, Professor and Chairman, Department of Radiotherapy and Radio-Oncology, SALK and Paracelsus Medical University. "This greater precision improves our ability to focus radiation to the tumour, while strictly limiting exposure to surrounding critical structures such as the rectum and bladder."
"We were astonished at the amount of healthy tissue dose reduction we could achieve. This capacity theoretically enables us to improve outcomes and reduce the potential for complications."
Peter Kopp, PhD, Deputy Head of Medical Physics, adds that the centre's treatment planning system reports significantly less dose in organs-at-risk for head-and-neck IMRT cases, which they have been recalculating for the Agility-equipped Synergy system.
Harnessing Agility's unique ability to deliver high-resolution beam-shaping over a large 40cm x 40cm field, the medical centre has used this new technology to treat virtually all indications, including stereotactic (SBRT/SRT) lung cases and other advanced IMRT therapies.
While the clinical performance of Agility is now foremost in the minds of the Salzburg physicians and physicists, the speed of the Agility upgrade made an impression.
"Our main interest was in limiting downtime, since we are operating only three linacs and could hardly compensate for one linac being down for a long period of time," Dr Kopp said. "Two weeks seemed extremely ambitious to accomplish a complete swap out of the MLC heads and to perform the measurements. But we all worked together - the Elekta personnel, our local service engineer, Georg Schrocker, in addition to the medical centre physics staff and IT engineers - to make it a success."
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