Elekta Introduces Next Generation SBRT for Lung Cancer with Ground-Breaking 4D Image Guidance to Manage Tumor Motion and Enhance Safety

Atlanta, GA (April 8, 2010) /PRNewswire/ — Elekta has introduced an advanced solution for treating lung tumors that enables doctors to visually confirm the 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. New research has shown that the lung tumor shifts position from day to day during the course of treatment (baseline shift).1 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. These strategies require complex, time-consuming planning and delivery, and prolong treatment with an inefficient stop-start (i.e., gated) beam delivery.

"Elekta's XVI Symmetry™ and XVI Intuity™ completely change the approach when it comes to the treatment of lung tumors," says Dee Mathieson, Senior Vice President, Oncology Business Line Management. "Symmetry provides tools to manage shifts in the relative positions of the tumor and organs-at-risk during the respiratory cycle, and Intuity ensures that not only is the tumor's position accounted for, but also the position of nearby healthy critical structures. This contributes to a more patient-friendly and safe treatment."

source: PR Newswire