Varian Expands Clinicians’ Cancer-Fighting Toolkit with Eclipse 15.5

Varian Medical Systems announced the newest release of its treatment planning system, Eclipse 15.5. This new release has received FDA 510(k) clearance, and incorporates several new treatment capabilities that offer clinicians the ability to create more precise treatment plans quickly. Eclipse 15.5 also provides treatment planning support for Varian’s HyperArc HDRT, a new type of radiosurgery treatment.
 
Eclipse 15.5 features MCO, which allows clinicians to explore what happens when different clinical criteria are varied; such as the degree to which particular organs are spared versus coverage of the targeted tumor. MCO leverages both RapidPlan and the existing optimization workflows to expedite finding the optimal plan for a given patient with minimal trial and error iterations.
 
For efficient treatment planning and automated delivery of complex stereotactic radiosurgery, Eclipse 15.5 now supports HyperArc. This new type of radiosurgery treatment is designed to capitalize on the unique capabilities of Varian’s TrueBeam and EDGE treatment platforms. HyperArc treatments exploit specific capabilities of the platforms to deliver more compact radiation doses that can fully saturate a targeted tumor and “fall off” sharply outside the target zone, minimizing and, where necessary, even eliminating dose to specific organs requiring more protection.
 
To increase the speed of plan development, Eclipse 15.5 offers Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) support. This enables clinicians to utilize GPU technology to optimize and quickly calculate the dose with Eclipse, including IMRT optimization and the intermediate dose calculation within the optimization.
 
“With Eclipse 15.5 we have seen an instant improvement in plan quality when using MCO, across a wide range of treatment sites,” said Suzanne Currie, clinical scientific lead at Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre. “We have been able to reduce doses to organs at risk to levels that could not have been envisaged before now, while at the same time tumor coverage has been maintained or even improved. Even in this short timeframe of using MCO, I would not want to plan without it.”
 
“Eclipse 15.5 provides clinicians with powerful new tools to quickly create optimized treatment plans that are unique to each patient,” said Ed Vertatschitsch, vice president, global portfolio solutions, Varian Medical Systems. “Additionally, the ability to utilize HyperArc for complex stereotactic radiosurgery is a significant step forward in the fight against cancer.”
 
“It can typically take many hours to create treatment plans for each patient,” said James Kavanaugh, instructor of Radiation Oncology and chief of affiliate satellite medical physics services at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. “When we evaluated about 160 patient treatment plans using the software, we found that it could help us more efficiently explore clinical tradeoffs of various treatment plans and improve the overall plan quality for the majority of cases.”