AlignRT for Pediatric Patients

Ensuring Comfortable, Contact-Free Radiation Therapy for Pediatric Patients

Traditional radiation therapy for children often involves uncomfortable procedures, such as tattoos, restrictive immobilization devices, additional radiation, or even anesthesia. These treatments can create stress, discomfort, and anxiety for the patient and their family.

AlignRT offers an advanced solution by limiting these painful and invasive elements. With SGRT clinicians can minimize the need for tattoos, less reliance on restrictive immobilization devices, and a reduction in additional radiation. This helps make treatments for pediatric patients more comfortable by reducing pain and stress, contributing to an improved overall experience.

The auto beam hold feature provides added reassurance by automatically pausing the beam if the child moves. This enhanced safety measure, combined with other interventions, may help reduce the need for anesthesias1.

AlignRT is also fully compatible with proton therapy, a treatment often used for pediatric patients. By improving treatment accuracy and patient comfort, AlignRT optimizes the delivery of proton therapy, ensuring precise targeting while reducing the need for invasive immobilization methods.

Benefits of Pediatric Treatments with SGRT:

Benefits to children being treated with SGRT, highlighted by Alisha Chlebik, Radiation Therapist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles2, include:

Lower Radiation Dose

“The decrease in repeat imaging … we want to give them the smallest radiation dose as possible.”

Less Immobilization/ Anesthesia

“We’re able to treat younger children without anesthesia and less immobilization – [pediatric patients] can go home much quicker.”

Shorter Treatment Time

“Times were reduced to 15-35 minutes per case … previously it could take us 45-60 minutes.”

Eliminates the Need for Skin Marks

Reduces stress about maintaining marks—children can go about their daily activities and hobbies without interruptions or awkward questions about radiation therapy tattoos and skin marks.

Pediatric Workflow with SGRT:
Sim

SimRT and Real-Time Coach provide contactless breath-hold training, minimizing infection risk and improving patient compliance. A recent study 3 found SimRT to be 3x more accurate than physical surrogates in predicting tumor movement with 4DCT.

Plan

MapRT provides the freedom to explore a greater variety of non-coplanar beams, optimizing target conformality while decreasing the dose to organs at risk (OAR). This clearance mapping tool eliminates the need for complicated re-plans and QA checks, streamlining the workflow.

Treat
AlignRT tracks a patient’s position before and during radiation therapy, to aid in setup and treatment accuracy and can help reduce treatment times by an average of 22% per fraction4-10. With continuous sub-millimetric motion management and beam control, it provides confidence in high-dose delivery.
Dose

DoseRT provides additional reassurance by offering real-time in-vivo images of dose delivery while simultaneously monitoring patient positioning, ensuring optimal treatment quality.

Hear from users on their clinical experiences:

  1. Nalley, C. (2022). Reducing Anesthesia Use Among Pediatric Radiation Therapy Patients. Oncology Times, 44(1), pp.27–27. doi:https://doi.org/10.1097/01.cot.0000816400.23944.5b.
  2. Alisha Chlebik, (2022) “SGRT Benefits for Pediatric Cases” SGRT USA Meeting.
  3. Qubala et al., (2023). Comparative evaluation of a surface-based respiratory monitoring system against a pressure sensor for 4DCT image reconstruction in phantoms. Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics, [online] p.e14174. doi:https://doi.org/10.1002/acm2.14174.
  4. Giantsoudi PhD, et al.(2022) Tattoo Free Set-up for Breast Cancer Patients Receiving Regional Nodal Irradiation, Practical Radiation Oncology  doi.org/10.1016/j.prro.2022.08.001
  5. Mueller et al. (2023) Accuracy and Efficiency of Patient Setup Using Surface Imaging versus Skin Tattoos for Accelerated Partial Breast Irradiation doi.org/10.1016/j.adro.2023.101183
  6. Sauer, TO. et al. (2023) Prerequisites for the clinical implementation of a markerless SGRT-only workflow for the treatment of breast cancer patients. Strahlenther Onkol 199, 22–29 doi.org/10.1007/s00066-022-01966-7
  7. Wei et al. (2020)Quantifying the impact of optical surface guidance in the treatment of cancers of the head and neck. J Appl Clin Med Phys, 21 pp. 73-82 doi.org/10.1002/acm2.12867
  8. Hickey et al. (2021) Surface Guided Radiotherapy (SGRT) vs Varian RPM for deep inspiration breath-hold (DIBH) breast treatments (2021) doi.org/10.1016/j.ejmp.2021.01.021
  9. Kang, S., Jin, H., Chang, J.H. et al. (2023) Evaluation of initial patient setup methods for breast cancer between surface-guided radiation therapy and laser alignment based on skin marking in the Halcyon system. Radiat Oncol 18, 60 doi.org/10.1186/s13014-023-02250-3
  10. Flores-Martinez et al. (2020) Assessment of the use of different imaging and delivery techniques for cranial treatments on the Halcyon linac. J Appl Clin Med Phys 21:53–61 doi.org/10.1002/acm2.12772

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Vision RT’s family of SGRT solutions guide radiation therapy for better patient care at every step: Sim, Planning, Treatment and Dose. Whether you’re looking for a quote, a product demo (virtual or in-person) or just more information, please get in touch.