Figure 11: MRI-LINAC at Sunnybrook Canada (Ref 12) Photo of the project during setup and installation (Ref 15)
First patient (Utrecht):
The first clinical application was very simple case which is the palliative treatment of spinal bone metastases. This allowed to test the geometrical accuracy of the system on real patients. The vertebra is easily visualized on the integrated megavoltage imaging system and allows for accurate comparison of field co-ordinates with MRI co-ordinates. The system was accepting patients since around 2012. (Ref 4). The individual MRI-Linac procedures were very reproducible, on average taking 41 min (range 33–44 min) and were well tolerated by the patients. This excludes approximately 15 min of bringing …show more content…
This reaction occure at the level of the machine as well as in the patient’s body within the soft tissue. Even if we consider this reaction as not harmful but still it can negate the effect of the treatment. Getting around this problem has been the main focus of those developing the technology, and several solutions have been found as the following:
Utrecht solution:
They had to modify the gradient coils and cryostat to allow passage of the beam. At present, a major challenge is the online Monte Carlo-based treatment planning. Secondary electrons interact with the magnetic field, and this interaction, including the electron return effect (ERE), has to be taken into account in the treatment-planning software. A second challenge is fast online image registration and tracking. A lot of progress is needed in that field (Ref …show more content…
MR Image-guided radiation therapy is gaining great interests and is one of the fast-growing areas in radiation therapy today. The Integrated MRI-radiotherapy systems are bringing in exciting new opportunities and are still in the early development stage. Radiotherapy may be at the brinks of a major change due to the great benefits of this new technology which is now enabling medicine to discover areas that were not seen before using previous x-ray, CT or CBCT LINACs. More units are to be operated clinically soon around the world which would enable us to do further researches and treat various cancer cases in new way while delivering more radiation dose to GTV and minimal to surrounding healthy tissues especially for moving organs or hard to see ones. Real time imaging during radiation delivery without exposing the patient to more radiation is a great advantage of MRI-LINAC. Based on that, MRI LINAC offers personalized patient treatments through on spot dose-guided radiotherapy using online recalculation and evaluation of the actual dose distribution. It is expected that high-field MRI-guided radiation therapy will become the standard of care within the next 10
First patient (Utrecht):
The first clinical application was very simple case which is the palliative treatment of spinal bone metastases. This allowed to test the geometrical accuracy of the system on real patients. The vertebra is easily visualized on the integrated megavoltage imaging system and allows for accurate comparison of field co-ordinates with MRI co-ordinates. The system was accepting patients since around 2012. (Ref 4). The individual MRI-Linac procedures were very reproducible, on average taking 41 min (range 33–44 min) and were well tolerated by the patients. This excludes approximately 15 min of bringing …show more content…
This reaction occure at the level of the machine as well as in the patient’s body within the soft tissue. Even if we consider this reaction as not harmful but still it can negate the effect of the treatment. Getting around this problem has been the main focus of those developing the technology, and several solutions have been found as the following:
Utrecht solution:
They had to modify the gradient coils and cryostat to allow passage of the beam. At present, a major challenge is the online Monte Carlo-based treatment planning. Secondary electrons interact with the magnetic field, and this interaction, including the electron return effect (ERE), has to be taken into account in the treatment-planning software. A second challenge is fast online image registration and tracking. A lot of progress is needed in that field (Ref …show more content…
MR Image-guided radiation therapy is gaining great interests and is one of the fast-growing areas in radiation therapy today. The Integrated MRI-radiotherapy systems are bringing in exciting new opportunities and are still in the early development stage. Radiotherapy may be at the brinks of a major change due to the great benefits of this new technology which is now enabling medicine to discover areas that were not seen before using previous x-ray, CT or CBCT LINACs. More units are to be operated clinically soon around the world which would enable us to do further researches and treat various cancer cases in new way while delivering more radiation dose to GTV and minimal to surrounding healthy tissues especially for moving organs or hard to see ones. Real time imaging during radiation delivery without exposing the patient to more radiation is a great advantage of MRI-LINAC. Based on that, MRI LINAC offers personalized patient treatments through on spot dose-guided radiotherapy using online recalculation and evaluation of the actual dose distribution. It is expected that high-field MRI-guided radiation therapy will become the standard of care within the next 10