“Treatment planning for radiotherapy or radiosurgery involves managing clinical tradeoffs to arrive at an optimal approach that maximizes dose to the tumor, and minimizes the impact on surrounding healthy tissues,” said Corey Zankowski, vice president, products and strategic portfolio management at Varian.
Varian Medical Systems recently announced that it will be adding a new tool to its radiotherapy treatment planning software that will enhance both planning efficiency and treatment plan quality. Licensed from the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics (Fraunhofer ITWM), the sophisticated multi-criteria optimization (MCO) radiotherapy treatment planning tool enables clinicians to quickly compare plans and select the optimal one without having to use a time-consuming trial-and-error process.
The licensing agreement will be effective January 1, 2016, and covers intellectual property, software, and a dedicated researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute who will work with Varian developers on integrating the Fraunhofer tool with Varian’s Eclipse treatment planning system.
Studies have shown that the use of multi-criteria optimization enhances both planning efficiency and plan quality compared with trial and error-based treatment planning.[1],[2],[3]
Varian will incorporate the multi-criteria treatment planning optimization tool into the company’s market-leading Eclipse treatment planning software. Eclipse, which is in use at some 3,400 cancer treatment centers around the world, was named “Category Leader” in 2014 and 2013 by KLAS, a research firm that specializes in monitoring and reporting on the performance of healthcare vendors.
[1] Craft, DL et al. Improved Planning Time and Plan Quality Through Multicriteria Optimization for Intensity-Modulated Radiotherapy. Int. J. Radiation Oncology Biol. Phys. (2012), Vol. 82, No. 1, pp. e83–e90 [2] D. Craft, D. McQuaid, J. Wala, W. Chen, E. Salari, and T. Bortfeld. Multicriteria VMAT optimization. Medical Physics, 39:686, 2012. [3] Kierkels et al. Multicriteria optimization enables less experienced planners to efficiently produce high quality treatment plans in head and neck cancer radiotherapy. Radiation Oncology (2015), 10:87.Varian Medical Systems
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