April 21, 2010 - Tracking tumor motion is one of the biggest challenges in radiation therapy. Gating is of the most sophisticated techniques for tracking tumors on moving organs and sparring surrounding healthy tissue. Respiratory gating allows the clinicians to adjust and turn off the beam when the tumor is out of range.
Varian Medical Systems has added motion management capabilities, which includes gated RapidArc, to its Trilogy linear accelerator (linac) platform for targeted radiotherapy. Gated RapidArc radiotherapy is designed to make it possible to monitor patient breathing and compensate for tumor motion, while delivering dose during a continuous rotation around the patient. This development supports RapidArc in targeting lung tumors with greater precision by gating the beam, turning it on and off in response to tumor motion. This set tools enables clinicians to monitor and adjust for tumor motion during treatment, and to utilize respiratory gating during a RapidArc treatment.
Varian's Clinac iX and Trilogy accelerators together with the new TrueBeam platform offer clinics a combination of motion management, speed and versatility tools.
The motion management interface can also be used with surface imaging technologies from companies such as Vision RT to position the patient, to monitor continuously for any movement, and to gate the treatment beam either as a result of detected patient motion or according to the patient's breathing cycle.
The interface also opens the door for other third party companies to connect their devices to Varian accelerators for the purpose of monitoring motion. These capabilities are of particular importance during frameless radiosurgery and stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) treatments.
For more information: www.varian.com
May 03, 2025 
