Brainlab launches automated stereotactic radiosurgery planning tools at ESTRO 2015

Introduction of new "Elements" completes the portfolio of automated, indication-specific planning tools for radiosurgery/SBRT

The "Elements" strategy - indication-specific focused software applications aimed at enhancing the workflow for difficult to treat indications in the brain and spine introduced in 2013 - comes full circle with the introduction of automated stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) planning tools. These new Elements enable on-the-fly generation of consistent treatment plans for VMAT delivery.

"Elements are a new generation of products that are indication-specific, user-friendly, fast, automatic and flexible," stated Stefan Vilsmeier, President and CEO of Brainlab, "Instead of competing with existing treatment planning systems, Elements complement them by providing additional treatment possibilities for difficult to treat indications."

Previously introduced Elements for cranial radiosurgery have focused on enhancing image fusion, distortion correction of various MRI sequences, interactive segmentation of tumors and vascular structures, fibertracking, dose review, and automatic segmentation of critical structures. Adaptive Hybrid Surgery tools have helped to simulate and evaluate the feasibility of radiosurgery treatments at different resection levels during surgery. Radiosurgery treatment planning for cranial indications, however, remains a manual iterative process that is highly user-dependent. One of the revolutionary new Elements tools Brainlab will introduce automatically generates highly conformal treatment plans for a variety of indications, locations, sizes, shapes and fractionation schemes, all with the click of a button. Instead of choosing between different delivery techniques, the Element algorithm produces a MU-optimized plan for delivery as volumetric, intensity modulated arc. For treatment of spherical targets, such as singular metastases, or small functional targets, such as trigeminal neuralgia, another new Element has been designed around the challenges of these specific treatments.

Spinal radiosurgery represents another challenging treatment with multiple complex and manual steps. Brainlab presents its vision of a "perfect" workflow, leveraging decades of experience in automatic image processing. In addition to streamlining the fusion and segmentation steps, another VMAT-based automatic planning Element for spinal SRS can generate complex yet highly conformal plans. This tool is specifically designed to address the visualization and optimization requirements for stereotactic treatments for spine indications.