Elekta, a provider of radiation therapy and radiosurgery, reports that the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (Arpansa) has ordered an Elekta linear accelerator
Arpansa will accept delivery of an Elekta Synergy system this summer (2008), and will utilise the Elekta system's high level of stability for its national physics measurements.
"It's very gratifying to add another prestigious physics standards laboratory to our group of Elekta users, who are so confident in the stability of Elekta Synergy that they chose our product to benchmark even non-clinical equipment and the equipment of other manufacturers," says Kevin Brown, advanced research director at Elekta.
"To have Elekta equipment serve not only as innovative solutions for treating serious disease, but also as global gold standards for accuracy in physics, is a testimony to the reliability of these systems".
Brown adds that Elekta Synergy and other systems in Elekta's portfolio of digital linear accelerators are traveling wave accelerators that use a magnetron as the microwave source.
Other commercially available linear accelerators use a standing wave/klystron configuration.
Arpansa joins several other centers that have acquired Elekta equipment for testing: the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the UK, the National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa, Canada, and the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Germany.
"In addition to stability, versatility has also been a key factor in these purchases," Brown says.
"These centres need to perform calibrations at a wide range of energies, which our systems have always accommodated."
