Accuray Inc. announced that the European CyberKnife Center Munich-Grosshadern (ECZM) has treated the world’s first patient with the new CyberKnife M6 System. With the installation of the new system, the Munich center, in close cooperation with the University Hospital of Munich, is the first to offer cancer patients treatment with the CyberKnife M6 System, the latest generation of the CyberKnife System. The new system is now able to provide enhanced quality, a streamlined user interface for treatment delivery and precision to radiation therapy treatments and continues to provide clinical capabilities including non-isocentric, non-coplanar robotic beam delivery and real-time tracking and automatic correction.

Breast density notification is becoming a reality in many states across the nation by virtue of legislation. A detailed review of breast density is beyond the scope of this article, but there are a few points that bear emphasis.

As other industries turn to the virtual cloud for a variety of information technology (IT) solutions, those in healthcare — especially in radiology — continue to weigh in carefully on the pros and cons of running software tools, as well as hosting their data and medical images, on a third-party server. While the potential for lower costs, improved scalability and faster deployment of services is attractive to physicians and hospitals, concerns such as security issues and increased dependence on an external service provider can also factor into decisions regarding the cloud.

The goal of radiation therapy is to deliver ionizing radiation to eradicate the tumor. Ionizing radiation, however, is indiscriminant and causes damage to both healthy tissues and disease volume along its path. A state-of-the-art treatment would employ intensity-modulated, irregularly shaped beams from various gantry angles to maximize the dose to the target volume and minimize the dose to the surrounding tissues. Accurate beam placement is thus critical to the success of radiation therapy.

Just a few years ago, the debate in radiology departments about workhorse X-ray systems was whether to convert from analog film to computed radiography (CR) cassettes and digital readers, or to direct imaging digital radiography (DR) systems. Today, there is no doubt DR has won that debate and is being widely adopted, and CR is falling out of favor.