Varian Medical Systems Accredits Royal North Shore Hospital as Australia's First Image-Guided Radiotherapy School

SYDNEY, Jan. 21 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- The Radiation Oncology Department at Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney has become the first in Australia to be formally accredited by Varian Medical Systems (NYSE: VAR), the world leader in radiotherapy, as a teaching facility for image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT). The hospital will hold four IGRT courses in 2010 and there are plans to extend this accreditation to other advanced techniques such as intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) and RapidArc® in the future.

"The advanced radiotherapy that we use in our department combines computer controlled technology with imaging equipment to deliver intensity-modulated radiotherapy and image-guided radiotherapy," says Associate Professor Michael Back director of radiation oncology at the hospital's Northern Sydney Cancer Centre. "These techniques enable the radiation therapists to image and precisely target the patient's tumor each day to within an accuracy level previously unheard of in conventional radiotherapy."

Prof. Back says the signing of the contract with Varian to provide other radiation oncology departments with training in such techniques is a great step towards improving the precision and quality of radiotherapy departments using this equipment across Australasia.

source: Varian