Precision systems assist cancer care

In a presentation entitled “A revolution in cancer care – how Schaeffler’s components are helping in the battle against cancer”, at a recent press event in Kent, Neil Madle, corporate communications and investor relations director, Europe, at Varian Medical Systems (VMS), explained how the use of the company’s KUSE sixrow ball monorail guidance systems on Varian’s radiotherapy couches contributes to treatment devices that offer “submillimetre” accuracy in the positioning of patients undergoing radiotherapy, while affording the couches substantial strength and rigidity – properties which have apparently proved especially important as the population gets heavier – and ensures they are extremely reliable while requiring minimal maintenance. Neil Madle complimented a business relationship spanning over a decade, a period during which he said radiotherapy technology had become more precise, more efficient and more effective – from the advanced intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) machines that first appeared in the late 1990s, which can take 20 minutes to complete their treatment cycle (“firing” radiation beams 200 times the power of diagnostic X-rays from different angles to create a “hotspot” over the tumour), to the RapidArc systems manufactured by Varian today. These use volumetric modulated arc therapy to deliver extremely precisely targeted treatment in as little as two minutes.

More accurate delivery

In between, he explained that the emergence of image guided radiotherapy machines in around 2004 had seen hospital radiotherapy departments able to use a CT, radiographic or fluoroscopic moving image of the patient taken on treatment day to identify a tumour’s position, enabling more accurate delivery of dose and automated repositioning during treatment to cater for movement of the tumour, for instance as the patient breathes. Simultaneously, stereotactic radiotherapy treatment had seen its first applications; here an “ultra-skinny” radiation beam acts like surgeon’s knife to destroy cancerous tissue. Most recently, Varian has developed RapidArc radiotherapy technology, where treatment can be completed with just a single revolution of the machine around the patient via “precisely sculpted” 3D dose distribution. RapidArc was only introduced in January, but VMS already has orders for some 300 systems worldwide. The UK’s first application will be at the Clatterbridge Centre for Oncology on the Wirral, with several other UK cancer centres due to follow.