AMSTERDAM /PRNewswire/ -- An 80-year-old lung cancer patient has become the first person in The Netherlands to be treated using a new linear accelerator that can deliver precise radiotherapy more quickly than conventional systems. VU University Medical Center carried out the treatment last week, becoming only the second hospital in Europe to begin clinical treatments using TrueBeam™ from Varian Medical Systems (NYSE: VAR).
The patient received eight stereotactic body radiosurgery treatments over a two-week period using TrueBeam in combination with Varian's RapidArc® technology.
Professor Ben Slotman, the hospital's head of radiation oncology, says, "The treatment has proceeded very well. Thanks to the higher dose rate delivery capabilities of TrueBeam and the speed of RapidArc, we were able to minimize the time this patient needed on the treatment couch and really limit the opportunity for tumor motion during treatment.
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"From a clinical perspective, TrueBeam enables better integration between imaging and treatment delivery, much faster dose output using the flattening filter free mode, and a much shorter time is needed for pre-treatment setup due to the user-friendly nature of the equipment."
The hospital, a pioneer in using advanced radiotherapy techniques, now plans to use TrueBeam to treat many more cancer patients with stereotactic body radiotherapy, which involves delivering the required dose with high precision in fewer, higher dose fractions - treatment sessions - than with conventional radiotherapy.
VU University Medical Center has used RapidArc radiotherapy technology to treat over 1,000 patients since becoming one of the first hospitals in Europe to introduce the technology in 2008. RapidArc delivers a volumetric intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) treatment in a single or multiple arcs of the treatment machine around the patient and makes it possible to deliver advanced image-guided IMRT two to eight times faster than is possible with conventional IMRT. Since its introduction, Varian has installed more than 500 RapidArc systems in cancer centers globally.
"We are delighted to now become only the second oncology center in Europe, after Zurich University Hospital, to treat clinically using TrueBeam," adds Prof. Slotman, who will be presenting research findings into both RapidArc and TrueBeam treatments at the European Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ESTRO) exhibition in Barcelona this week. "We now have cone beam CT scans and RapidArc on all six treatments machines in the department, which allows us to use the new technologies for large groups of patients."
