by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | September 16, 2019
From the September 2019 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
RaySearch
The company is building on its RayStation treatment planning system and RayCare oncology information system with a treatment control system called RayCommand.
The new system is designed to link RayStation and RayCare and coordinate activities in and between treatment rooms to maximize resource utilization and treatment accuracy. The product is about two years from being released, said Bjorn Hårdemark, deputy chief executive officer of RaySearch.
RayCommand will also lead the way for online adaptive radiation treatments, Hårdemark said.
“Clinical practice today is to make a plan for the way a patient looks several days before the first day of treatment, and deliver that same plan over several weeks. To deal with patient and tumor changes, oncologists use margins,” Hårdemark said. “The most modern way to deal with anatomical changes it is online adaptive therapy. We have the software technology to achieve this, but we haven’t connected that to any treatment room yet. With RayCommand, we could.”
RayCommand would also be vendor neutral.
“Varian and Elekta and ViewRay are also working in that direction for their respective systems, but we can do it for any system,” Hårdemark said.
In December of 2018, the company added two machine learning systems to RayStation. One is used for patient segmentation. In the U.S., the company was FDA-cleared for using machine learning to define where the healthy organs are. In other markets, the technology was cleared to find where the tumor is.
Machine learning is also used for planning.
“It learns from previous examples what a dose distribution looks like for particular patients,” Hårdemark said.
Varian Bravos afterloader system
Varian
In October 2018, Varian unveiled its Bravos afterloader system for brachytherapy treatments, which delivers radiation via tiny radioactive source placed directly into the tumor. The new device improves workflow with a touchscreen that includes patient and treatment information and a customizable pre-treatment checklist, and LED lights to guide clinicians through the correct connection process of the transfer guide tubes.
