February 4, 2008 - Nucletron BV and clinicians at The Cancer Centre, Northern Ireland, proudly report the first IMRT clinical treatment within the Conventional or Hypofractionated High-Dose Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy for Prostate Cancer (CHHiP) clinical trial utilizing Nucletron's Oncentra MasterPlan.
CHHiP, part of the NCRN/NCRI portfolio of cancer trials and sponsored by the Institute of Cancer Research, is a Phase III national, multi-centre, randomized trial for the treatment of prostate cancer using external beam radiotherapy.
The IMRT module, Oncentra Optimizer and its Direct Step & Shoot (DSS) capabilities, provides the right planning tools to shape the radiation doses in a complex multi-target area in the prostate while at the same time reducing the dose in the surrounding healthy tissues, including the bladder and rectum.
“We are very pleased to have started IMRT treatments within this important trial," said Vivian Cosgrove, M.D., clinical scientist at The Cancer Centre, Northern Ireland. “During the clinical work-up, we were impressed by the improvements to the IMRT planning process the Direct Step & Shoot facility can provide, both in terms of planning efficiency and in the conformance of dose to very challenging dose-volume constraints.”
At the Northern Ireland Cancer Centre, Oncentra MasterPlan operates with modern accelerators and CT, MR and PET/CT scanners. Key features of MasterPlan, such as image registration, image fusion and multi-modality imaging, play an important role in uniting information between the imaging and treatment equipment. Features such as mutual information image fusion, extra-planar image reconstruction and manipulation, and fusion verification software capabilities can reduce the time physicians need for contouring target and organs-at-risk volumes. Inherent in MasterPlan is a sophisticated, DICOM RT compliant archive that will make the treatment-planning workflow more efficient and improve plan-data traceability and transfer, within the Cancer Centre and beyond.
For more information: http://www.nucletron.com