IT-V Medizintechnik

Positioning devices in the radiology field

In oncology – the branch of medicine devoted to cancer – linear accelerators (or LINACs) are often used to treat tumours; these LINACs customise high-energy x-rays or electrons to match the tumour’s shape while sparing the healthy surrounding tissue. Correct patient positioning is therefore crucial to avoiding incorrect treatment and undesirable side effects. In addition to this, patients must remain still throughout treatment and maintain the same position across many treatment sessions, regardless of how many are necessary. To ensure this, IT-V provides hardware, such as highly specialised site-specific devices with multiple reproducible settings, on which patients can lie. This ensures that patient movement is kept to the absolute minimum and enables the most accurate treatment; it also includes other devices such as a mask system to prevent movement of the head.

“Worldwide, there are only four or five companies in the business of positioning devices in the radio-oncology field,” Markus notes. “And at the moment, there are only two big companies producing linear accelerators: Elekta and Varian. Back in the beginning, when we were starting with positioning devices for standard treatment, I was dealing with a company called Medical Intelligence. This company was developing positioning devices for stereotactic treatment, a very precise form of therapeutic radiation. Elekta acquired Medical Intelligence, so we began collaborating with Elekta and are now distributing our products globally via them. But we still maintain very strong collaboration with our clinical partners, not only with the University Hospital of Innsbruck but with partners like the LMU Munich and UMC Utrecht.”

A deeper dive

It was through this relationship with Elekta that IT-V came to be involved in STARLIT, an ITEA project that ran from 2017 to 2020. This combined cancer interventions and monitoring in real time to increase radiation accuracy and minimise unintended doses to healthy tissue. One of STARLIT’s use-cases focused on MR-LINAC, a linear accelerator that combines magnetic resonance (MR) imaging with radiation therapy. Markus: “Elekta and Philips were the two main partners developing these MR-LINAC devices, which are primarily run by software. With traditional treatment, you typically only perform a CT scan at the beginning and sometimes during the treatment. The innovation in MR-LINAC is that during the treatment, you can visualise where the tumour is moving in real time.”

“Doing our part for the positioning devices was a unique chance for us to get a deeper dive into Elekta. We also met key people from the Netherlands Cancer Institute and other companies, so it was a very good collaboration for us. We gained much more knowledge about the MR field because before that we had positioning devices for traditional treatment and were a bit more CT-oriented. MR is becoming more prevalent in radio-oncology, replacing or adding to normal CT scans. STARLIT helped us a lot to gain more knowledge on this and now we have a new family of products for MR.”