At the Jefferson Hospital for Neuroscience in Philadelphia, clinicians for the first time in the U.S. used the Brainlab Automatic Brain Metastases Planning software to guide radiotherapy on a patient with five cancer tumors in the brain. The entire procedure took about twenty minutes to perform, including the setup, essentially an order of magnitude faster than traditional approaches that take up to a half hour per tumor site.
Previously, it would take up to a half hour to target a single tumor and each one required a separate radiation session. With Automatic Brain Metastases Planning, the tumors can be targeted much faster and radiotherapy administered to up to ten of them at the same time.
Some of the software features according to the product page:
- Offers automatic prescription selection based on tumor volume criteria
- Different treatment options are possible based on a clinical paradigm selection—from single fraction radiosurgery to fractionated SRS or SRT
- Automatically selects a group of metastases, but has the ability to unselect metastases that should not be treated under the automated single isocenter (i.e. easy clustering of regional subgroups)
- Optimization of multi-leaf collimator apertures and collimator angles for highly conformal beam delivery
- Comprehensive assessment of dose distribution related to each metastasis
- Automatic 3D dose visualizations for individual tumor prescription and half prescription IDL
- Global 3D dose projection visualization for complete normal tissue dose evaluation
- Individual Conformity Index calculations for each metastases
- Arcs rotate forward and backward at the same table position, covering any metastasis either by the first or the second arc
- To avoid exposing normal tissue to an unnecessary dose, metastases lining up in the direction of leaf-motion are not treated simultaneously
Product page: Automatic Brain Metastases Planning…
Source: Brainlab…