February 7, 2017 — IBA (Ion Beam Applications S.A.) recently announced the first clinical implementation of its Dolphin Online Ready Patient QA and Monitoring solution in the United Kingdom.
With the use of Dolphin attached to the hospital’s TrueBeam treatment machine, the team at the North West Cancer Centre in Londonderry, Northern Ireland, set a new standard for high quality cancer therapy and a more efficient patient quality assurance (QA) process.
“With Dolphin we can perform fully independent, measurement-based quality assurance of our most advanced IMRT [intensity modulated radiation therapy] and VMAT [volumetric arc therapy] treatments quickly and confidently.” said Andrew Reilly, M.D., head of radiotherapy physics at the North West Cancer Centre, Londonderry. He continued, “Being so straightforward to use, it allows us to plan to the capabilities of the treatment machines, rather than limiting what we do because legacy verification processes cannot keep up. This ensures our clinicians can offer the best possible care to their patients.”
Wendy Hyland, M.D., radiotherapy physicist added, “The measurement process is so easy I can spend more time thinking about what the results mean rather than worrying about the measurements themselves.”
Dolphin is a complete solution that offers a higher capability to detect and verify possible treatment dose discrepancies compared to conventional QA solutions, according to IBA, thus contributing to a more efficient and safer radiation therapy. This improvement is based on Dolphin’s significantly higher treatment dose measurement resolution.
Highly complex IMRT and rotational treatment plans are delivered and measured with the Dolphin transmission detector prior to each patient treatment. A sophisticated TPS-Class software allows verification of dose deviations in 3-D patient anatomy between the plan and actual delivered dose measured with Dolphin.
The hospital’s patient QA workflow efficiency is increased with Dolphin’s “plug and play” wireless setup and its automatic verification software displaying instant QA results.
The Dolphin solution including the detector and the software is online-ready and currently used for pre-treatment QA. The system will be capable of measuring the actual patient treatment dose in online mode, fraction by fraction. The online capability is currently pending release.
For more information: www.iba-dosimetry.com