May 18, 2009 - Varian Medical Systems introduced at the GEC-ESTRO exhibition in Porto, Portgual, on May 14-16, 2009, BrachyVision Acuros, which is designed to enable clinicians to rapidly calculate patient doses for brachytherapy treatments (a form of radiotherapy) with an extremely high level of accuracy.
The new method, according to the manufacturer, is a more accurate way of calculating the dosimetry of cancer treatments, compared to standard techniques using the American Association of Physicists in Medicine TG43 formulism.
Dose levels for brachytherapy have generally been calculated as if the sources are surrounded by water, whereas in reality a patient’s anatomy contains many different materials such as bone, lung, tissue and air, as well as additional materials that are often present from inserted applicators. In the past the only way to account for this was using Monte Carlo calculation techniques, something that was only available as a research tool. Now, for the first time in routine clinical brachytherapy, BrachyVision Acuros is able to account for the dose effects from these variations.
Acuros, developed by Transpire, Inc., is an optimized, radiotherapy-specific rewrite of the software product Attila, and Varian is working exclusively with Transpire to bring this calculation method to the radiation oncology field.
BrachyVision Acuros, which uses a technique best described as a Grid-Based Boltzmann Solver (GBBS), is the most significant additional feature of Varian’s latest brachytherapy treatment planning software offering, BrachyVision 8.8. The full system will be demonstrated for the first time at GEC-ESTRO.
For more information: www.varian.com and www.transpireinc.com
April 18, 2024 
