STOCKHOLM, Nov 1, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Elekta (EKTA-B.ST) today announced that its Elekta Unity magnetic resonance radiation therapy (MR/RT) system was featured in 11 abstracts at the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) Annual Meeting, which took place October 21-24 in San Antonio, Texas. Elekta Unity, which received CE Mark in June 2018 and currently pending U.S. FDA 510(k) premarket clearance, is the first high-field MR/RT system that allows clinicians to see and track difficult-to-visualize soft tissue anatomies in real-time during radiation dosing.

"As a transformative approach to cancer care, clinical implementation of MRgRT requires not only novel hardware and software systems, but also needs clinical evidence to enable treatment that is optimized for specific tumor types and to address the unique anatomy and tumor biology of each patient," said X. Allen Li, PhD, Chief Physicist, Department of Radiation Oncology at Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin Clinical Cancer Center.

"The MR-linac studies presented at ASTRO add to the solid foundation of data demonstrating how MRgRT can address some of the historic challenges to balancing effective delivery of radiation to tumors while protecting nearby tissues and organs at risk. This has the potential to improve outcomes for cancer patients."
The data presented at ASTRO reflect the broad array of studies that the Elekta MR-linac Consortium is conducting to generate the clinical evidence that will support optimum use of MR/RT in diverse clinical settings. The Consortium is a collaborative industrial-academic partnership that Elekta founded with seven centers and its technology partner, Philips, in 2012 to provide an evidence-based introduction of Elekta MR-linac to the medical community, and to support the advancement of the technology.

In addition to the abstracts presented at ASTRO, the first clinical centers in Europe presented their experience on online adaptation treatments with Elekta Unity at the Elekta User Meeting held in conjunction with the Annual Meeting. These presentations described how European centers that have clinically implemented Unity are adapting each treatment to daily anatomies while the patient is on the treatment table. These adapted treatment sessions can be completed in 30 – 45 minutes.

Key findings presented by the Consortium at ASTRO included:

Inter- and intra-patient peristaltic motion assessed with Cine-MRI1
This study evaluated the motion of organs due to peristalsis using 2D cine-MRI images acquired during simulation of radiation therapy. A total of 33 cine MRI sets were acquired and select fractions for 10 patients with pancreatic cancer were analyzed for various organs, including gall bladder and liver. Gall bladder motion results from both peristalsis and breathing, while liver motion is primarily due to breathing. As a result, subtracting liver motion from gall bladder motion allows the impact of peristalsis on organ motion to be assessed. Results show that peristalsis can result in abdominal organ motion of up to 10 mm, and that the pattern of this motion is complex compared with motion due to breathing. Importantly, results show that peristalsis-related motion can be irregular and persistent throughout radiation therapy imaging and delivery. This underscores the need to manage peristaltic motion in high-precision radiation therapy for abdominal tumors.

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