Why TomoTherapy®?
“I think TomoTherapy is one of the most exciting developments of the past 35 years.”
- Revolutionary design
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Conventional radiation treatment devices are at the end of an evolutionary path that began more than a century ago. The TomoTherapy® Hi·Art® treatment system, in contrast, was designed in the 1990s. Our goal was to develop a machine that could turn advanced, optimized radiation treatment concepts into reality.
The Hi·Art treatment system:
- Looks like a CT scanner because it is a CT scanner, allowing efficient 3D CT imaging to be used for ensuring the accuracy of treatment for every patient, every day™
- Leverages the ring gantry geometry used in CT scanning for the delivery of state-of-the-art, intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) from all angles around the patient
- Was designed so that highly-precise treatment plans could result in more effective treatment deliveries, with minimized side effects for patients
- Complete integration
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As an all-in-one solution, the Hi·Art system facilitates the first fully-integrated treatment process for radiation therapy. This greatly reduces the number of technical decisions that need to be made, giving clinicians more time to focus on their patients.
The Hi·Art treatment system:
- Incorporates easy-to-use software for treatment planning, quality assurance, patient set-up and treatment delivery, all using the same secure centralized database
- Includes a powerful, 32-processor computer system that rapidly creates sophisticated IMRT plans
- Stores all patient and plan information in a single location; removing the risk of data transfer errors
- Unparalleled precision
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Conventional radiation therapy machines use 5-9 beam angles, and were developed for 2D and 3D conformal therapy. The Hi·Art treatment system delivers radiation continuously from all angles around the patient, and features patented beam-shaping technology created specifically for IMRT. More beam angles, plus more precise beam modulation, creates dose distributions that conform to complex tumor shapes like never before.
The Hi·Art treatment system:
- Delivers helical (continuous 360º) IMRT that uses tens of thousands of narrow beamlets, all targeting the tumor and individually-optimized to contribute to the total tumor dose
- Offers by far the most beamlets of any form of IMRT, which translates to the most precise conformal radiotherapy available
- True accuracy
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The Hi·Art treatment system’s integrated CTrue™ technology lets clinicians efficiently acquire CT images for every patient, every day. These can be used for positioning purposes, and allow for the quantitative, dosimetric analysis and modification of a patient’s treatment at any point during the treatment course.
The Hi·Art treatment system:
- Ensures accurate delivery of precise helical IMRT plans via 3D image-guided set-up, based on daily pre-treatment CT scans
- Increases clinical confidence because it integrates imaging into the treatment geometry; images are fundamentally in the same frame-of-reference as the treatment beams
- Full assurance
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Since day one, a central goal of ours has been to show the dosimetric effects of misalignments and anatomy changes, and to let clinicians do something about it.
The Hi·Art treatment system:
- Allows the same 3D images used in daily patient positioning to be used for dose guidance; this gives clinicians the ability to visualize the dose that will actually be delivered to the patient that day
- Makes true adaptive radiation therapy (ART) practical, with highly-integrated Planned Adaptive™ software for evaluating dose and applying any needed changes to the plan
