SGRT: Essential care for Alfred Health

Alfred Health has been benefitting from SGRT with AlignRT for more than 13 years. Their journey started after they were looking for a contactless approach that would provide safe and highly accurate DIBH treatments.

As a large teaching hospital treating more than 1,700 cancer patients each year, Alfred Health has always looked to deliver the most advanced and clinically accurate treatment for patients. “As very early adopters of the AlignRT system, we were initially focused on developing an efficient, accurate and patient-friendly workflow for delivering DIBH breast radiotherapy – which was a relatively new technique worldwide and not widely utilized in Australia yet,” explained Cat Russell, Head of Planning. “However, SGRT technology offers potential for much more than just DIBH breasts – it also offered a more comprehensive overview of patient positioning for all of our patients,” she continued.

After seeing the value of SGRT and the supporting clinical evidence, the department expanded the technology extensively into their work practices. “We have incorporated SGRT into our daily problem-solving.  The video mode allows for precise patient positioning before imaging.  We can also replicate a patient’s position if the patients support equipment is compromised during treatment,” says Cat. “The SGRT technology also helps with CT simulation to determine if a patient is suitable for breath hold treatment or not”.

Cat added that, in addition to increasing accuracy and expanding applications, the technology provides an excellent patient experience. “We have been able to remove tattoos from our set-up process since 2012, which is a fantastic achievement for patient care. We have had instances of patients seeking to have their treatment specifically at our centre for this very reason”.

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Vision RT is the inventor of Surface Guided Radiation Therapy (SGRT), contact-free technology that uses 3D cameras and computer vision to help ensure radiation therapy is delivered safely to cancer patients. There are more than 2,000 systems installed worldwide.

AlignRT is a contactless and non-invasive technology that tracks patient’s position before and during radiation therapy with sub-millimetric accuracy. This ensures radiation is delivered exactly as planned.