January 22, 2008 – With the recent CE designation of Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) in Europe, two sites are now utilizing Elekta technology to implement clinical treatments, reportedly offering a significant improvement to existing advanced radiation therapy techniques, such as Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT), and offering a faster alternative to helical tomotherapy.
With VMAT technology, the target is continuously radiated while the source of the beam is rotated around the patient in single or multiple arcs. By simultaneously controlling gantry position, gantry speed, leaves of the multileaf collimator (MLC), collimator angle and dose rate, a highly conformal dose distribution is created in significantly less time than with today's techniques. With VMAT from Elekta, a treatment session typically can be conducted in five minutes or less, including true 3D imaging to secure the location of the target.
Elekta's solution for VMAT treatments is a complete package that includes MOSAIQ , an image-enabled oncology Electronic Medical Records (EMR) system that supports each member of the cancer care team. The package also contains ERGO the first treatment planning system to employ inverse-planning techniques for rotational IMRT. When combined with existing digital linear accelerators, this system provides a solution for clinical VMAT cancer treatment.
The two sites currently implementing VMAT are TheRoyal Marsden Hospitalin Sutton, UK and General Hospital Vienna in Austria to treat cancer using Elekta's VMAT solution.
For more information: www.elekta.com
July 09, 2024 
