Varian Medical Systems announced at ASTRO that it has added new motion management capabilities to the Eclipse radiotherapy treatment planning system, designed to increase treatment precision for tumors in mobile areas of the body, such as the lung.
The new features in Eclipse have been added to enable the system to generate animated images to show how a tumor is moving when the patient breathes. The application reportedly now allows the doctor to evaluate the magnitude of the motion, and plan the treatment to minimize the amount of tissue exposed to the treatment beam. For image-guided radiotherapy, the moving images in Eclipse can be compared with images taken at the treatment machine later in a course of treatment, to allow for adjustments if the tumor has moved due to respiration.
“To plan these kinds of treatment in the past, we had to manually import and co-register both PET and CT images from all of the phases of the respiratory cycle and work with these individually in a process that took about three hours per case,” said Allan Caggiano, MS, chief physicist at Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck, New Jersey. “This new tool in Eclipse reduces that timeframe down to something quite manageable, by allowing the PET and CT images to be easily imported and automatically co-registered.”
April 18, 2024 
