Elekta Introduces 4D Guidance for Lung Tumor Treatment

Swedish oncology firm Elekta of Stockholm has introduced XVI Symmetry and XVI Intuity, two new products that promise to advance lung tumor radiation therapy by enabling doctors to visually confirm a tumor’s position during the breathing cycle. This new technology treats the lesion with a continuous radiation beam, increasing therapy accuracy while using less imaging radiation during treatment delivery.
Lung tumors have been among the most challenging radiation therapy targets because the patient’s breathing causes tumors to move and the lung tumor shifts position from day to day during the course of treatment. Doctors often have had to use external skin surface markers or implanted markers to estimate lung tumor position during the breathing cycle and then apply the beam only during certain points in the patient’s respiration.
XVI Symmetry captures image data during the breathing phase and performs sophisticated computations to provide 4D data. This data helps to visualize the tumor position in each phase of the respiratory cycle to arrive at an average position of the tumor for each treatment. XVI Intuity extends image guidance by better enabling critical structure avoidance, which allows doctors to understand the positional relationship between the target and organs at risk. This ensures that anatomical changes and corrections to set-up errors have not inadvertently put critical structures into the radiation beam’s path.
XVI Symmetry and XVI Intuity are feature sets of version 4.5 of Elekta’s X-ray Volume Imaging (XVI) package of software solutions for Image Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT). XVI 4.5 recently received 510(k) clearance and CE marking, to enable sales and distribution in the United States and Europe.