November 22 2010  |  News Article 


VMAT reduces the treatment time and significantly reduces the risk of serious side effects 

VMAT reduces the treatment time and significantly reduces the risk of serious side effects for patients. The University Hospital Regensburg (Regensburg, Germany) was the first clinic in the world that used the new procedure from Nucletron in clinical routine.

Continuous radiation with VMAT
"We achieve the shorter treatment time by moving the radiation device, the linear accelerator, continuously around the patient during the radiation. At the same time we can change the speed of this movement, the strength of the radiation and the shape of the radiation field continuously, so that the result is an optimal treatment, "describes Dr. Barbara Dobler, leading physicist at the University Hospital Regensburg, Department of Radiotherapy, regarding the new procedure. “In the conventional IMRT treatment the radiation can be given only from certain angles. During the move from angle to angle, the beam has to be switched off again and again,” she added.

Radiation time of less than 5 minutes
While a conventional IMRT takes between 10 and 20 minutes, the radiation time with VMAT is under 5 minutes.
"This is a major achievement for the patient. We therefore use the current method for prostate, head and neck cancer and tumors in the spine," said the chief doctor, Dr. Fabian Pohl, University Hospital Regensburg, Department of Radiotherapy. “Whether VMAT has advantages over conventional treatment techniques in other tumor types, e.g.,breast cancer is currently being tested in research projects,” he added.

New method  in University Hospital Regensburg clinical routine for the first time worldwide
With more than 5,000 IMRT radiation treatments per year, the department for radiation therapy at the University Hospital Regensburg was already one of the leading national and international centers of radiation treatment. In recent years, radiation oncologists and medical physicists from Europe and Asia visited the UKR to learn the method of IMRT and implement it in their hospitals. This led to a close cooperation between the UKR and Nucletron, a leading provider of state of the art radiotherapy solutions for cancer treatment, which made it possible to deal very early with the new, more advanced VMAT solution for rotational radiation therapy.

The University Hospital Regensburg was the world's first hospital that has clinically applied  the new planning system from Nucletron. Together with the development department of Nucletron the physicians and medical physicists of the radiotherapy department performed the necessary preparations so that the new method could be used in the clinical routine already in February this year. As part of an international seminar on IMRT, the new procedure will be introduced to radiation therapists and medical physicists from Europe and Asia. Prof. Dr. Oliver Koelbl, Director of the Department of Radiation Therapy said, “We could already present first results at our national congress and at international congresses in Europe and in the US and also published the news in international  journals.”
Visit the website of the University Hospital Regensburg