April 4, 2017 — Mevion Medical Systems announced the installation of the first Mevion S250i proton therapy system with Hyperscan pencil beam scanning at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C. This technology will allow MedStar Georgetown to deliver enhanced intensity modulated proton therapy (IMPT) by combining fast energy modulation with sharp lateral penumbra, improving the treatment options available to cancer patients.
This is the first installation of Hyperscan with Adaptive Aperture, Mevion’s novel proton multi-leaf collimator. The installation at MedStar Georgetown will be followed by a Mevion S250i installation at Zuidoost Nederland Protonen Therapie Centrum, co-located at the Maastricht Clinic, in the Netherlands, and at the Ackerman Cancer Center in Jacksonville, Fla., the second unit installed at the private, physician-run center.
The Adaptive Aperture is a proprietary low-profile micro-multi-leaf collimator system designed specifically for Hyperscan pencil beam scanning. It eliminates the need for manual apertures and adjustments because its layer-by-layer beam collimation achieves one to three millimeter collimated effective spot sizes for all energies. Hyperscan with Adaptive Aperture is capable of scanning a typical lung tumor in less than two seconds – eliminating many of the challenges caused by patient motion that other pencil beam scanning systems encounter.
Proton therapy provides targeted radiation treatment for many types of cancer, significantly reducing the dose of radiation to healthy tissue by as much as a factor of three, while still maintaining high conformance to the treatment target.
For more information: www.mevion.com