by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | October 29, 2018
From the October 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Denef said the ProteusONE, which has a smaller footprint and offers an affordable solution for a one-room proton therapy system, has become the preferred technology as fewer facilities have built multi-room facilities.
Several years ago, developers thought that having four to five rooms would be more financially beneficial, but patient recruiting was more difficult for more remote Proton Therapy Centers.
“There was an idea that if you build it they would come,” Denef said. “Which happened for some, but not for the ones that were far away from city centers.”
The company’s IBA Dosimetry solution decreases the time needed for beam data commissioning and accelerator QA, Denef said.
In the future, IBA is looking to continue to improve imaging and introduce improved workflows, Denef said. The ultimate goal is to do adaptive treatment, using the cone beam CT to replan quickly just before treatment starts.
Mevion Medical Systems
Earlier this year, Mevion received FDA clearance for HYPERSCAN pencil beam scanning for its compact MEVION S250i Proton Therapy System. Shortly afterward, MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., became the first to treat a patient with the system, which combines pencil beam scanning with a single-room machine.
The system features what Mevion calls the Adaptive Aperture proton MLC, which the company says generates layer-by-layer specific beam collimation and blocking with beam sharpening performance identical to conventional proton therapy apertures.
“The combination of HYPERSCAN and Adaptive Aperture moves the science of proton therapy ahead to even sharper dose distributions,” said Skip Rosenthal, vice president of clinical systems for Mevion Medical Systems.
The company has two more systems in deployment, one in Europe and another system being installed in the U.S. in the fall.
An important aspect of the HYPERSCAN is the ability to have support from advanced treatment planning, and the company has a collaboration with RaySearch. Currently, centers will be using RayStation, the RaySearch treatment planning system to provide clinicians with Monte Carlo-based planning for HYPERSCAN. Rosenthal said that by the end of the year, RaySearch will release the ability to plan and treat using the full multilayer collimation capabilities of Adaptive Aperture.
