Elekta’s Versa HD system will be used for treatments in three different Australian centers: Macarthur Cancer Therapy Centre at Campbelltown Hospital, Adelaide Radiotherapy Centre and Nelune Comprehensive Cancer Centre at Prince of Wales Hospital.
Versa HD is a novel linear accelerator for the delivery of stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) and radiosurgery (SRS) programs, allowing clinicians the ability to deliver high-volume conventional techniques while also delivering advanced therapies. Versa HD comes equipped with the Agility™ 160 multileaf collimator for high-speed, high precision beam shaping, enabling accurate tumor targeting, improved healthy tissue preservation and rapid delivery of more advanced therapies.
This past summer, the Macarthur Cancer Centre had already substituted its two linear accelerators with the novel Versa HD systems,
“With Versa HD, all of our prostate cases now get daily CBCT scans, enabling us to characterize the tumor and its position during treatment much more accurately than we could before,” Dion Forstner, MD, Director of Radiation Oncology said in a press release. “Also, our previous systems allowed only simpler beam shaping. With the Agility™ multileaf collimator on Versa HD, beam shaping is far superior and much faster. Treatment time is substantially less using Versa HD, particularly for IMRT cases. For example, on a head-and-neck IMRT case, we save about 10 minutes, so we can treat at least three patients in an hour, whereas before we were struggling to treat two patients in that time.”
With this technological update, the center will have the opportunity to augment its patient treatment volume by up to 30%.
“We will be using Versa HD for SBRT of lung, liver and especially prostate cases, and we’ve treated our first SBRT case, a patient with lung cancer,” Dr. Forstner added. “Implementing SBRT also will now allow us to participate in multicenter SBRT trials.”
At Adelaide Radiotherapy Centre, the implementation of Versa HD will allow clinicians to deliver different advanced radiation therapy treatments for a wide spectrum of cancers.
“Versa HD really changes how we can treat cancer in so many ways. It will expand the range of cancers that can be successfully managed with radiation and shorten treatment times, which reduces the impact on patients’ quality of life. We are able to be so precise in targeting tumors that in certain clinical applications we can deliver higher doses in fewer treatments and achieve better outcomes with fewer complications”, ARC radiation oncologist Marcus Dreosti, MD said in the press release.
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Nelune Comprehensive Cancer Centre has just substituted its linear accelerators with an Elekta Infinity and a Versa HD system, which will join the center’s Elekta Axesse system, acquired back in 2009.
“With Versa HD, we’re looking forward to shorter treatment times, particularly for simpler treatments, such as prostate cases, and better dose distributions for conventional IMRT cases and for VMAT once we start using that technique,” Michael Jackson, MD, radiation oncology center director stated in the press release. “We will use the system mainly for cancers in the brain, lung, liver, pancreas and spine, in which the ultra-conformal beam shaping capabilities of Versa HD are especially important,” he added.
