Surgical Robotics Technology
Accuray has announced that the Nagoya City University Hospital in Aichi has treated the first cancer patient in Japan using the Radixact® System with ClearRT™ helical fan-beam kVCT imaging. ClearRT imaging is designed to make it easier and faster to view patient anatomy – the tumor and surrounding healthy tissue – with greater image clarity. Better clarity in imaging will enable medical care teams to make more informed decisions about all aspects of the patient’s treatment and improve the quality of care for almost any patient who would benefit from radiotherapy.
Nagoya City University Hospital, a core medical institution in metropolitan Nagoya in Aichi, is dedicated to providing optimal care to each cancer patient and to enabling these patients to live in their homes and participate in society while receiving treatment. The introduction of ClearRT on the Radixact System will provide the Nagoya team with a powerful tool for delivering personalized, precise and accurate treatments. Importantly, most patients can continue normal activity during and immediately following Radixact treatment.
“We are very pleased to be able to use ClearRT imaging with the Radixact System to enhance our high-precision radiotherapy program. ClearRT enables us to rapidly confirm the position of lesions and organs in the body (for example, brain, liver, pancreas, prostate, uterus, etc.), with an image quality that is almost the same as a diagnostic CT scan. We can now minimize the patient’s position shift between the treatment planning stage and the daily irradiation and deliver cancer treatments with greater precision than ever before,” said Satoshi Ishikura, M.D., Deputy Director of High Precision Radiotherapy Center at Nagoya City University Hospital. “In the future, in addition to further improvements in accuracy, I expect it will be possible to adapt treatment to deliver the optimal radiation dose based on changes in the size, shape and position of the lesion during the treatment period, and to reduce side effects beyond what we have been able to achieve so far.”
The Center for Cancer Control and Information Services (Japan) estimates that in 2020 there were more than one million people in Japan diagnosed with cancer, reinforcing the need for innovative treatment options that effectively manage the disease while minimizing potential side effects and their impact on daily life. Based on the 2020 estimate1, breast, lung and prostate cancers were among the top five of all new cancer cases diagnosed. The Radixact System, based on the TomoTherapy® platform, with ClearRT imaging provides an integrated, helical radiation delivery and imaging system that make it an optimal solution for treating these tumors, as well as the complete range of radiotherapy indications.
“We are proud to partner with the Nagoya City University Hospital team, a long-time TomoTherapy platform customer that, like Accuray, is focused on providing patients with a better, safer radiotherapy option that enables them to get back to living their lives, faster,” said Suzanne Winter, president of Accuray. “There is a growing trend in radiotherapy toward increased use of hypofractionation – a shorter course of radiation with higher doses per fraction – which offers benefits for both medical care teams and the patients they treat. The Radixact System with ClearRT imaging facilities the delivery of this advanced treatment approach and will support the Nagoya team’s efforts to provide the highest standard of care for their patients.”
The Radixact® System’s helical design enables medical teams to deliver radiation from 360 degrees around the patient. This provides greater control of the radiation dose so it conforms precisely to the tumor and minimizes dose to healthy tissue. ClearRT™ helical fan-beam kVCT imaging is faster than other imaging offerings on the market with excellent uniformity and low noise across the entire image, improved soft tissue visualization and exceptional spatial resolution, which is intended to enhance the versatility and efficiency of the Radixact System in the radiation therapy department.
1 https://ganjoho.jp/reg_stat/statistics/stat/short_pred_en.html accessed on August 30, 2021
SOURCE Accuray Incorporated
