Ensuring Accurate Treatment Delivery

Successful treatment is dependent on accurate treatment delivery, which hinges on accurate set-up and patient position during treatment. SGRT can ensure precise delivery of radiation treatments without tattoos, bony tissue or implanted surrogates.

• Tattoo-less Setup: Tattoos, permanent markers placed on the patient’s skin, have been commonly used to position patients using lasers on the treatment couch. Accuracy issues related to surgical scaring, skin elasticity, and weight-loss, together with the increased accuracy requirements of IMRT, VMAT, SBRT, and SRS have made tattoos less relevant to delivering a treatment, but tattoos are still important to maintaining clinical throughput, because they serve as a guide to place the patient on the treatment couch.

Using SGRT, tattoos can be eliminated. The guidance from the SGRT system can both guide the therapist in patient placement and provide the couch shifts required to accurately move the patient to the linear accelerator isocenter for treatment delivery, using lasers and visual cues. SGRT simplifies the treatment workflow and eliminates the need for unsightly patient tattoos.

• Verifying Patient Position within Clinical Margins: Delivering hypo-fractionated VMAT, SBRT, or SRS treatments requires that the patient be positioned accurately, with the tumor placed within a very tight clinical margin. Traditionally, an image guidance system such as CBCT is used to ensure correct positioning. While localizing the treatment delivery to the tumor is ideal, for most disease sites visualizing the tumor is difficult. Tumor density is similar to the adjacent tissue and/or the tumor is moving, due to respiratory motion, so an exact position is difficult to determine. Often, either bony tissue or implanted surrogates are used as guidance for treatment delivery, and localization is typically done once before treatment can be initiated.

Using SGRT, the patient’s surface is used for localization. Studies show that clinical margins required are similar to using IGRT, with the added benefit of monitoring the patient’s position during the entire treatment session and without delivering excess non-therapeutic dose to the patient. SGRT allows the delivery of the same treatment with more emphasis on patient safety.

Discover how SGRT solutions from C-RAD ensure more accurate treatment delivery, while helping teams work more efficiently and providing a better patient experience. Find out more.