The British Institute of Radiology (BIR) hosted a workshop entitled 'Advances in Image Guided Radiotherapy' on Monday 21 March 2005
This meeting, jointly organised by Qados and Vision RT, was attended by approximately 50 delegates from 25 UK centres as well as visitors from Italy and the USA.
Professor George Chen, director of radiation physics, at the Department of Radiation Oncology in Massachusetts General Hospital, and professor at Harvard Medical School, travelled from Boston especially to address the audience.
Professor Chen's department have been using AlignRT, a real-time surface imaging system developed by Vision RT, since June 2004.
Other invited speakers included Vincent Khoo (consultant clinical oncologist, Royal Marsden and Christie Hospitals), Margaret Bidmead (head of radiotherapy physics (Royal Marsden Hospital Medical School) and David Landau (consultant clinical oncologist, Guy's and St Thomas' Hospitals).
The talks provided a comprehensive overview of some of the key problems with patient setup and motion in radiotherapy as well as the image guidance technologies which are beginning to address these.
Results were presented from clinical studies using AlignRT highlighting some of its unique benefits.
These included reports suggesting a significant improvement to partial breast irradiation patient setup when using AlignRT instead of lasers or port films.
