by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | October 10, 2022
From the October 2022 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
The company’s system, which treats patients in a seated position, can be installed in an existing linac vault, eliminating the expense of construction.
“We are excited to open our operational proton therapy site for clinical research and training, as well as for demonstrating the opportunity for oncology centers to expand their cancer fighting potential to include proton therapy,” said Michael Marash, P-Cure’s chief executive officer, in a statement announcing the opening of the center. “P-Cure is proud to become a member of the world-wide research community expanding the clinical benefits of proton therapy and demonstrating what is the most cost-effective system available to existing oncology centers.”
ProTom International
ProTom International is moving forward with installation of a Radiance 330 proton therapy system at the new Australian Bragg Centre in Adelaide, which is expected to begin operating in early 2024 as the first proton therapy center in Australia and the Southern Hemisphere.
The Australian center will incorporate new enhancements that the company has been making to its Radiance 330 proton therapy system over the past few years, said Stephen Spotts, chief executive officer of ProTom International.
The system has a new nozzle with a more precise beam and reduced size for more maneuverability around the patient. The gantry has also been completely redesigned to make installation easier and faster, Spotts said.
The company has also made software upgrades to improve patient automation and usability.
“One of the things that we're very proud of [about] our system is that it was designed by our RTs and clinicians to make the user experience much more user friendly,” Spotts said. “The recently-installed software upgrade has made that user experience better for the RTs.”
RaySearch
RaySearch recently launched deep learning-based automatic treatment planning for photon and proton therapy. The new solution, which is included in the RayStation treatment planning system, reduces the time to create a deliverable treatment plan significantly, said Martin Janson, senior product manager for proton therapy at RaySearch. In addition, the deep learning automatic treatment planning ensures an even quality and reduces dependency on the skill of the individual treatment planner.
RaySearch has also invested heavily in making use of the computer’s graphics card for heavy calculations.
“At RaySearch, we know that the quality of a treatment plan is highly dependent on the speed of the planning tools and have therefore worked hard on supporting GPU-accelerated algorithms,” Janson said. “A great example of this is last year’s migration of our proton Monte Carlo dose engine to the GPU, which makes it possible to compute the dose using the most accurate algorithm in just a few seconds. A few years ago, a computation like this was expected to run for several hours.”
