Radiation therapy firm Varian Medical Systems is touting study results that suggest its RapidArc technology can be used to treat patients with blood cancers by delivering "clinically favorable" total marrow irradiation (TMI).
The results were presented last week at the 2011 joint meeting of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) and the Canadian Organization of Medical Physicists (COMP) in Vancouver.
RapidArc appears to improve dose distribution in terms of normal tissue sparing, as well as treatment efficiency, compared with conventional intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) and tomotherapy, according to study co-author Bulent Aydogan, PhD, associate professor of medical physics at the University of Chicago and the director of medical physics at the University of Illinois.
Aydogan and colleagues planned and delivered RapidArc TMI treatments for six patients and compared the treatment plan parameters, including median dose, mean dose, and maximum dose, to fixed-gantry and tomotherapy plans for the same cases.
They found that RapidArc produced dose distributions comparable to those from conventional IMRT in terms of target coverage, but with improved normal tissue sparing.
RapidArc treatments could also be delivered in approximately 18 minutes once a patient was positioned for treatment. By comparison, treatment times of 45 to 50 minutes have been reported for TMI delivered using conventional IMRT and tomotherapy in previous studies.
