A Brainlab press release says that the “Elements” strategy—indication-specific focused software applications aimed at enhancing the workflow for difficult to treat indications in the brain and spine introduced in 2013—has now come full circle with the introduction of automated stereotactic radiosurgery planning tools at ESTRO 2015 (24–28 April, Barcelona, Spain), which enable improvised generation of consistent treatment plans for volumetric arc therapy delivery.
“Elements are a new generation of products that are indication-specific, user-friendly, fast, automatic and flexible,” said Stefan Vilsmeier, president and chief executive officer of Brainlab. “Instead of competing with existing treatment planning systems, Elements complement them by providing additional treatment possibilities for difficult to treat indications.”
Previously-introduced Elements for cranial radiosurgery have focused on enhancing image fusion, distortion correction of various magnetic imaging resonance sequences, interactive segmentation of tumours and vascular structures, fibretracking, dose review, and automatic segmentation of critical structures. Adaptive Hybrid Surgery tools have helped to simulate and evaluate the feasibility of radiosurgery treatments at different resection levels during surgery. Radiosurgery treatment planning for cranial indications, however, remains a manual iterative process that is highly user-dependent.
One of the new Elements tools Brainlab will introduce automatically generates highly conformal treatment plans for a variety of indications, locations, sizes, shapes and fractionation schemes, all with the click of a button. Instead of choosing between different delivery techniques, the Element algorithm produces an monitor unit-optimised plan for delivery as volumetric, intensity modulated arc. For treatment of spherical targets, such as singular metastases, or small functional targets, such as trigeminal neuralgia, another new Element has been designed around the challenges of these specific treatments.
Spinal radiosurgery represents another challenging treatment with multiple complex and manual steps. In addition to streamlining the fusion and segmentation steps, another volumetric arc therapy -based automatic planning Element for spinal stereotactic radiosurgery can generate complex yet highly conformal plans. This tool is specifically designed to address the visualisation and optimisation requirements for stereotactic treatments for spine indications.
