PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 6, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- Varian Medical Systems (NYSE: VAR) today announced that it will be adding a new tool to its radiotherapy treatment planning software that will enhance both planning efficiency and treatment plan quality. Licensed from the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics (Fraunhofer ITWM), the sophisticated multi-criteria optimization (MCO) radiotherapy treatment planning tool enables clinicians to quickly compare plans and select the optimal one without having to use a time-consuming trial-and-error process.

The licensing agreement will be effective January 1, 2016, and covers intellectual property, software, and a dedicated researcher at the Fraunhofer Institute who will work with Varian developers on integrating the Fraunhofer tool with Varian's Eclipse™ treatment planning system.

"Treatment planning for radiotherapy or radiosurgery involves managing clinical tradeoffs to arrive at an optimal approach that maximizes dose to the tumor, and minimizes the impact on surrounding healthy tissues," said Corey Zankowski, vice president, products and strategic portfolio management at Varian. "The Fraunhofer multi-criteria optimization tool lets physicians take a set of optimized plans and explore what happens when different clinical criteria are varied—such as the degree to which particular organs are spared versus coverage of the targeted tumor. As different clinical criteria are emphasized, the clinician can look at the tradeoffs and choose a plan that best fulfills the treatment goals."

Studies have shown that the use of multi-criteria optimization enhances both planning efficiency and plan quality compared with trial and error-based treatment planning.[1],[2],[3]

Varian will incorporate the multi-criteria treatment planning optimization tool into the company's market-leading Eclipse™ treatment planning software. Eclipse, which is in use at some 3,400 cancer treatment centers around the world, was named "Category Leader" in 2014 and 2013 by KLAS, a research firm that specializes in monitoring and reporting on the performance of healthcare vendors.

"We are pleased to be entering into this partnership with Varian, the global market leader in radiation oncology technology and to have our decision support paradigms incorporated into Eclipse, the leading treatment planning software solution," said Prof. Dr. Karl-Heinz Kuefer, head of department optimization at Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics. "We feel that Varian is in the best position to take our tools and put them to work helping people in thousands of clinics around the world."

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