April 14, 2011 – The U.S Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has cleared a new brachytherapy treatment planning system for permanent seed implants. The MIM Symphony module, from MIM Software, provides a powerful combination of tools to benefit radiation oncologists working with brachytherapy.
MRI, CT and even molecular imaging can now be seamlessly integrated into treatment planning for increased quality assurance.
“Brachytherapists can now enjoy the same image display, fusion and manipulation tools as their colleagues in radiology, and the same contouring tools as their colleagues performing IMRT – all directly integrated into the brachytherapy treatment planning software,” said Jonathan Piper, director of research and business development at MIM Software.
Key to the software is the new ReSlicer tool. For treatments requiring needle insertions that aren’t precisely perpendicular to the imaging plane, ReSlicer allows images to be quickly and easily reoriented, ensuring accurate planning and dosimetry for otherwise complicated plans. The tool adds confidence and simplicity to breast, lung, liver and other treatments.
“Our goal was to achieve totally flexible seed placement,” Piper said. “The use of ReSlicer in conjunction with thin-slice imaging allows for more precise planning and better orientation of seeds within the patient. In addition, fusion with mo¬dalities such as MRI offers more accurate contouring of targets and the possibility of dose escalation.”
The software seamlessly integrates many of the tools found in MIM Maestro, the company’s radiation oncology product. Using dose accumulation, it can sum a brachytherapy plan with any other DICOM dose file, giving an accurate representation of the full dose delivered to the patient. This can be essential to identifying and compensating for hot spots and underdoses, and provides much more confidence than reviewing two separate dose volume histograms.
Post-implant quality assurance is much more accurate. Multi-modality fusion allows either the original planning image or a separate post-implant image, such as an MRI, to be registered to a post-implant CT for more reliable target contouring. Combined with seed localization accuracy, which exceeds the resolution of the CT image, post-implant dosimetry is both easy and exact.
For more information: www.mimsoftware.com
July 31, 2024 
