February 17, 2015 — RaySearch Laboratories AB announced that Westdeutsches Protonentherapiezentrum Essen (WPE) in Germany, a subsidiary of University Hospital Essen, has commenced routine clinical operations with the RayStation treatment planning system from RaySearch. The first clinical treatment generated with the help of RayStation was carried out in January 2015 and the first patient was a four-year-old boy with a malignant brain tumor who received radiation therapy for the entire craniospinal volume.
WPE, being the first university-based proton therapy center in Germany with three gantries and one fixed beam line, started treating patients in mid-2013 and has to date treated more than 150 patients with proton beam therapy. The tumor is irradiated with high precision by scanned or scattered proton beams; the radiation dose can thereby be delivered more precisely and as a result, the unwanted dose to healthy tissues is reduced, leading to a risk reduction of treatment-related side effects.
The RayStation functionality specification for WPE spans the entire spectrum of advanced treatment planning such as model-based segmentation, atlas-based segmentation, robust optimization, deformable registration, dose accumulation and treatment adaptation.
Prof. Beate Timmermann, M.D., medical director at WPE, commented: “With RayStation we’re able to manage more types of cancer than before. This gives hope to patients with tumors in the central nervous system or sarcomas among others. A development like this was only possible due to the intense partnership between our doctors and physicists and the staff of RaySearch.”
Prof. mult Eckhard Nagel, M.D., medical director of the University Hospital Essen, added: “We are very proud that WPE is the first proton therapy center in Europe that uses RayStation. This offers us the possibility to help much more patients with cancer than before and opens the way for successful cancer therapies even under difficult conditions.”
For more information: www.raysearchlabs.com
April 18, 2024 
