Physicians in India Show Intense Interest in Arc Based Radiation Therapy

The prospect of dramatically increasing radiation therapy treatment speed using dynamic, arc-based radiation therapy is capturing the imagination of Indian clinicians, if Dr. Vivek Mehta’s recent experience is any indication. Dr. Mehta, a radiation oncologist at Swedish Cancer Institute (Seattle, Wash., USA) gave three lectures on Elekta VMAT at the 32nd National Annual Conference of the Association of Radiation Oncologists of India Conference (AROICON) Nov. 25-28, 2010, in Patna, India, which drew capacity attendance and provoked vibrant interaction and discussion among participants.

“VMAT is an emerging technique that is coming to India,” says Dr. Mehta, director, Center for Advanced Targeted Radiation Therapies at Swedish Cancer Institute. “Due to Swedish’s leadership in implementing VMAT, it was appealing to the AROICON committee to have us talk about it to their members.”

Dr. Mehta presented results from Swedish Cancer Institute’s first 100 patients treated with Elekta VMAT. One presentation was on non-stereotactic VMAT, one covered high-dose, hypofractionated VMAT using a stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) technique for lung tumors, and a third lecture discussed general VMAT use at an invitation-only Elekta symposium.

Many attendees were as interested in how VMAT compared with IMRT as they were about efficiencies of treatment speed.

"Clinicians asked whether VMAT is better than IMRT, in which clinical cases IMRT might be superior to VMAT and what planning challenges VMAT may present," he says. “What made our presentation interesting to the attendees was the actual proof from our center. For the first 100 patients we treated with VMAT we ran a comparison IMRT plan. We could show how we did on conformality, speed and QA, and how many times we ended up using one, two or three arcs and how long each plan took to deliver based on the number of arcs.”

source: Elekta