Radiotherapy Planning Software

A new software system speeds up radiotherapy treatment planning and expedites clinical adoption of the most advanced cancer treatment techniques.

Varian Medical Systems (Palo Alto, CA, USA), a leading company that develops cancer therapy technology, presented the company's Eclipse radiotherapy treatment planning system at the 48th annual meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM), held in Orlando (FL, USA) from July 30 to August 3, 2006.

The software is a comprehensive and versatile treatment planning program, capable of producing plans for conventional radiotherapy, intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT), brachytherapy, and proton radiotherapy. The system incorporates many time-saving features like disease-specific planning protocols and easy-to-use optimization tools that make it easier and faster to plan sophisticated cancer treatments.

"With Eclipse, we've given clinics the capabilities they need to offer advanced treatments including IGRT, in addition to supporting the full range of more conventional treatments,” remarked Dow Wilson, president of Varian's Oncology Systems business.

Ron Lalonde, Ph.D., chief scientific officer for D3 Advanced Radiation Planning Services (Pittsburgh, PA, USA), uses multiple treatment planning systems to produce IMRT plans for clinical customers around the country. He stated, "Dose calculation with Eclipse is twice as fast” as other programs he uses. "Because 99% of our plans are for IMRT, we do things that are fairly dose-calculation intensive. There is no question that the fluence optimization process with Eclipse has improved our IMRT planning. Because it's interactive, you can tweak the plans on the fly and generate better plans more rapidly.”

Eclipse incorporates a set of tools that streamline the process of creating a customized plan for each patient, including: a personalized library of clinical protocols and treatment plan templates, remote planning capabilities, a tool for specifying normal tissue dose constraints, an interactive dose visualization display, and an automated segmentation tool that automates the contouring step in which clinicians separate diseased tissues from surrounding healthy organs on three-dimensional (3D) diagnostic images.



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