Control Software Designed to Connect Radiotherapy Treatment Machines

It combines an oncology-specific patient electronic medical record (EMR) with functional components for managing clinical, administrative, and financial operations.

The system is now in use at 2,500 treatment centers worldwide. Varian Medical Systems (Palo Alto, CA, USA) has successfully connected its Aria oncology information and Eclipse treatment planning systems to two Elekta (Stockholm, Sweden) Synergy linear accelerators. The milestone in connectivity occurred in just one week at St. Anne’s Faculty Hospital in Brno, Czech Republic, the country’s second largest city, and radiotherapy treatments have commenced using the newly integrated system.

The hospital opted to replace its Elekta Mosaiq software system with Aria to bring two sites together on one network. “Aria was selected because we feel its capabilities are all-embracing,” stated Jan Garcic, head physicist at St. Anne’s. “The commissioning of the Elekta machines with Aria and Eclipse was done successfully and has enabled us to carry out seamless radiotherapy planning, CT [computed tomography] scanning and simulation. We can now create plans anywhere and for every radiotherapy treatment machine across our network.”

As a result, teams of therapists, oncologists, and physicists are working with the same patient information on the same system at St. Anne’s and the nearby Masaryk Memorial Cancer Institute. Masaryk uses Varian software and treatment machines whereas St. Anne’s has operated using Elekta machines and software until the recent decision to convert its software suite. Together, the public hospitals are delivering advanced radiotherapy treatments for 3,000 new cancer patients each year.

“Since Aria was centralized across the network, the workflow for both sites has improved considerably,” said Joachim Brazerol, Varian’s area sales manager. “Planar imagers created on the Elekta units are stored in Aria and can be accessed in both sites for review. All treatment histories can be accessed from both sites without any imports or exports.” He paid tribute to the way all parties, including Varian’s local distributor Amedis Prague, collaborated to ensure a smooth installation.

The Aria oncology information has been rated among the top three oncology information technology (IT) solutions every year since 2008 by Klas (Orem, UT, USA), an independent research firm that reports on the performance of healthcare vendors.

Varian Medical Systems, Inc. is a world-leading manufacturer of medical devices and software for treating cancer and other medical conditions with radiotherapy, radiosurgery, proton therapy, and brachytherapy.

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