Already installed in a leading cancer center in Saudi Arabia, Varian’s advanced TrueBeam radiotherapy treatment system is due to be deployed at three more Middle East hospitals in the coming months.
Designed to treat a moving target with unprecedented speed and accuracy, Varian’s TrueBeam system incorporates numerous technical innovations that dynamically synchronize imaging, patient positioning, motion management, and treatment delivery during a radiotherapy or radiosurgery procedure. TrueBeam has been designed from the ground-up to advance the treatment of lung, breast, prostate, intracranial, head and neck, and other types of cancer.
An important feature of the TrueBeam system is its High Intensity Mode, which makes it possible to deliver dose up to four times faster than can be accomplished with other radiosurgery machines, significantly shortening treatment times. This capability makes the system ideal for stereotactic radiosurgery and respiratory or hypo-fractionated radiotherapy treatments. Cutting down treatment time by a factor of two to four makes a big difference to patients, and it can enhance treatment accuracy by leaving less time for tumor motion during dose delivery. Using the TrueBeam system, a standard intensity-modulated treatment that would typically take ten minutes can be completed in less than two minutes. Such advances in speed of treatment enable greater throughput at busy radiotherapy centers.
The flexibility of the system offers a selection of an optimal treatment approach in each case, from 3D conformal and intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) to stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), from stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) to volumetric arc (RapidArc®) therapy. In addition, a new Gated RapidArc capability makes it possible to use RapidArc with tumors that are subject to respiratory motion, such as many tumors of the lung or liver.
TrueBeam is the result of ten years’ development work at Varian’s R&D and engineering facilities in the US, Switzerland and the UK. The desire was to create a new radiotherapy treatment device from the ground up, integrating all recent technological advances into a new platform rather than having them as ‘bolt-ons’ to previous systems. Such an approach would bring ergonomic and treatment benefits as well as enabling future advances to take place. Indeed, among the features on TrueBeam is a ‘developer mode’, an easily accessible non-clinical research mode which is intended to unlock the imagination of users and encourage future enhancements.
Major advances in radiotherapy over the past 20 years have been implemented on a pre-existing platform – they have been either hardware of software augmentations. With TrueBeam, those advances in speed, efficiency and precision have been built into a newly-designed platform, along with several new capabilities.
Using TrueBeam, clinicians can deliver any form of radiotherapy or radiosurgery, whether 3D conformal, intensity-modulated, image-guided, volumetric or stereotactic – whichever approach is considered most appropriate for the individual patient.
As for the compelling advantages for TrueBeam over previous treatment platforms, they can best be summed up as follows:
- Treatment delivery that’s up to 50% faster, enabling lung radiosurgery in seven minutes and taking Varian’s RapidArc technology from two minutes to one minute to deliver
- A five-fold reduction in the steps needed for imaging, positioning and treating patients
- Better and faster image guidance, including imaging during treatment
- Unparalleled precision, with over 100,000 data points measured during treatment to maintain a “true isocenter”
- New treatment possibilities, such as gated RapidArc – where the beam is delivered in synch with the patient’s breathing pattern -- and much wider choice of X-ray and electron energy levels
- Simplified workflow, with just two monitors instead of four, and one keyboard instead of multiple
- A sleek new design, inside and out
More than 380 orders have been placed for TrueBeam systems globally since its introduction in 2010 and to date about 145 installations are completed or in progress at hospitals around the world. In the Middle East, the system is already installed at the Azizia Royal Clinic in Riyadh and treatments have commenced. The system has also been ordered by two further top Riyadh cancer centers – KFSH, which has ordered two units and KSA-KKUU, which has ordered one – as well as the IMCC in Cairo, Egypt.
