Patient Safety Innovations in the Spotlight for Sun Nuclear at ASTRO 2015

In advance of the annual meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO), the leading provider of tools to enhance patient safety, Sun Nuclear Corporation, announced two key research milestones for its independent, patient-specific quality assurance (QA) solution, PerFRACTION™ 3D. In addition, the company announced its ASTRO schedule of in-booth presentations.

Key Milestones for Measurement-based Patient QA

PerFRACTION 3D will be shown by Sun Nuclear during ASTRO, with demonstrations in booth #1071. PerFRACTION 3D is an EPID-based, automated patient QA solution, enabling phantom-less pre-treatment QA for every patient and efficient in-vivo QA for every fraction.

Sun Nuclear will show a successful 3D dose calculation on cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) images using PerFRACTION 3D’s daily in-vivo patient QA feature. Calculation of delivered dose onto the daily CBCT is scheduled for commercial release in 2016. The CBCT-based dose results, collected at a clinical partner site, were nearly identical to the planning dose, indicating clinicians had done an effective job aligning the patient during the image registration process.

“Our vision for PerFRACTION is a next generation patient QA platform that provides full independence and automated workflow for pre-treatment and per-fraction QA,” said Jeff Simon, chief executive officer of Sun Nuclear. “Following dose computation on the planning CT, it was a logical next step to compute dose onto the daily CBCT image sets. We are excited to demonstrate this capability at ASTRO, and to deliver meaningful improvements to radiation oncology patient safety in the coming months.”

Sun Nuclear will also discuss initial results from its new Monte Carlo dose calculation software for independent patient QA. Dose for a 10-field IMRT case has been computed in under three minutes, with results comparable to that for Eclipse Acuros® and Sun Nuclear’s GPU-accelerated Collapsed Cone Convolution dose calculator. Extensive validation studies are planned over the coming months.

“We are very pleased to see such promising initial results for both speed and accuracy,” stated Bill Simon, president and chief science officer of Sun Nuclear. “Offering a world class Monte Carlo dose calculation engine exclusively for QA demonstrates Sun Nuclear’s desire to continually push boundaries and set a higher standard for patient safety.”

Registration for In-Booth Presentations Now Open

ASTRO members are encouraged to visit the Sun Nuclear booth to hear colleagues discuss the practical application of tools to enhance patient safety. Topics include: clinical experience with the PerFRACTION platform; workflow efficiency gains with SNC Machine™ for machine QA; effective strategies for improving treatment plan quality, using PlanIQ™ software. Registration is free and open now. To learn reserve a spot, visit sunnuclear.com.

About Sun Nuclear Corporation

Sun Nuclear Corporation is the worldwide market leader in QA (quality assurance) and dosimetry solutions for Radiation Oncology. The company designs and manufactures medical devices and software for radiation therapy treatment delivery systems and patient prescription verification. Sun Nuclear’s solutions perform radiation measurement, data collection, testing, performance assessment, and analytics for over 4,000 radiation oncology clinics worldwide. The company is a pioneer in radiation detector research and development, most notably solid state diode detectors and ionization chambers. The company holds numerous patents for groundbreaking product designs and distributes solutions directly in the US and through a network of over 60 trained distributors outside of the US.