Siemens Healthineers Debuts Two CT Systems for Dedicated Radiotherapy Planning

September 15, 2019 — Siemens Healthineers debuted two computed tomography (CT) systems dedicated to radiation therapy (RT) planning at the 2019 annual meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO), Sept. 15-18 in Chicago. The new introductions include the Somatom go.Sim and the Somatom go.Open Pro, both of which are pending U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 510(k) clearance and are not yet commercially available in the United States.

Designed to accommodate patient positioning accessories and increase patient comfort, the 64-slice Somatom go.Sim and the 128-slice Somatom go.Open Pro have an 85 cm bore. Both systems also feature optional Siemens Healthineers-manufactured patient marking lasers known as DirectLasers that are mounted directly onto the gantry and controlled via a mobile tablet. New GO with Green mobile workflow brings ease of use and walks the radiation therapist through each step of the patient setup process. This enables the therapist to remain at the patient’s side, potentially improving communication and comfort as well as reducing anxiety. 

The Somatom go. Sim and Somatom go.Open Pro also feature DirectOrgans for organs at risk (OAR) contouring. This software automatically addresses the dependency between image quality and the consistency of autocontouring results. DirectOrgans uses a specialized image reconstruction, optimizing the CT images for autocontouring and applying a deep learning-trained contouring algorithm. DirectOrgans may help reduce unwarranted variations with high-quality contours that approach the level of consensus-based contours.

The Somatom go.Open Pro CT system features the Direct Intelligent 4D (Direct i4D) technology, which adapts the image acquisition to a patient’s breathing in real time during the scan. Direct i4D is designed to help optimize image quality for each patient, reducing motion artifacts that are common to four-dimensional image sets and often prompt rescans. In this manner, Direct i4D images can help customers treat more patients with techniques such as stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) that require a high degree of precision to avoid damaging healthy tissue.

For more information: www.siemens-healthineers.com