Surface-guided radiation therapy: Vision RT

Abstract

Vision RT is one type of surface-guided radiation therapy (SGRT) that Radiation Oncology division of King Chulalongkorn Memorial Hospital has used for positioning during radiotherapy session. It makes treatment more accurate by using a contact-free technique to tract the patient’s skin surface in real-time with sub-millimeter accuracy and to ensure that radiation is only delivered when the patient is in the correct position. If the patient moves out of tolerance margin, the Vision RT can automatically send signal to the treatment delivery system and pause the radiation delivery. Vision RT is considered to be safe, using infrared radiation, which is non-ionizing radiation. It is different from checking patient’s position by using image guided radiation therapy (IGRT) which uses ionizing radiation. Besides real-time checking, Vision RT can be used to check the patient’s positioning before radiotherapy for many types of cancer, such as breast cancer, brain tumor, lung cancer, liver cancer, sarcoma, head and neck cancer, etc. In addition, the using of Vision RT can be used to substitute marks or tattoos for positioning patients set up prior to treatment therapy.