Philips Healthcare announces as a work-in-progress item, adaptive planning software for its Pinnacle³ Radiation Treatment Planning System. The new software will be designed to address the physical changes that take place throughout a patient’s treatment process.

As a patient’s physical condition changes throughout the treatment process, such as weight loss or tumour shrinkage, the initial treatment plan may no longer reflect accurately the real dose that is being delivered to the patient’s anatomy to target the tumour and spare normal tissue. In such a case, the best course of action is to adapt the initial treatment plan to a new one, to suit the patient’s current anatomy, while taking into account the dose that has already been delivered.

Although there are several products on the market claiming to provide solutions for adaptive planning, the feedback from focus groups suggests that there is no one commercial product that addresses all the problems in a holistic manner, in one system that is practical for a busy Radiotherapy Department.

Adaptive Planning with Philips Pinnacle³ is intended to fill this gap, by addressing the requirement of a single system with a set of features that are comprehensive and flexible, to facilitate the different types of adaptive workflows that users need, making it easy to handle the complex workflow of adapting a treatment plan multiple times and also making it practical and economic.

The product itself is being designed to address three key areas. The first is assessment of the patient’s condition to decide whether their current treatment plan needs changing. This assessment would be made using Trending Tools to quickly analyse a patient’s changes over time and assess if a new plan is needed and a Temporal Manager programme to simplify the management of multiple images and plans over the course of therapy.

The second stage, which would be to adapt the existing plan to reflect the changes to the patient’s anatomy, would make use of Adaptation Tools that enable the user to quickly duplicate the contours and all relevant planning information to the new image set, thus reducing the number of steps from twelve to four. The third element is to automate workflow so the first two stages of assessment and adaptation do not create a bottleneck.

Pinnacle³ radiation therapy planning system, which comes with fast, accurate and interactive treatment planning tools, provides the foundation for IGRT adaptive planning. Fully integrated photon, electron, stereotaxy, brachytherapy, simulation, image fusion and IMRT options allow the user to perform treatment planning tasks from a single platform. In addition, Pinnacle³’s Collapsed Cone Convolution Superposition algorithm is the industry’s most accurate, true 3D dose calculation algorithm.

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