QEII Foundation Unveils Innovative Radiation System, Welcomes $1 Million BMO Donation

Nova Scotia Health’s chief of medical physics was as animated as a child showing off a new toy Friday night at the Cancer Care Center in Halifax’s Dickson Building.

Unlike the excited kid with a new gadget, Dr. James Robar doesn’t intend to hoard the novelty. Instead, he wanted the medical community, the city, the county and the world to see the breakthrough innovation in radiation therapy for cancer patients.

“The take-home message is that this is a platform, a machine that can really visualize you, adjust the way we’re going to treat you in 15 minutes, and then deliver that custom, personalized treatment plan on a day-to-day basis. can deliver,” said Robar as he was about to lead about 30 people into a treatment room with the revolutionary Ethos Therapy System featuring a new HyperSight imaging solution.

“We have never had the opportunity to adapt radiotherapy in this way. The existing platforms that we have in this aisle can give you an image, but at a much lower quality, and what we do with that image is relatively limited.

“For example, we can see that a patient is misaligned, and shift that patient up, down, left, right, sometimes rotate it a little bit. But what if your tumor has grown or shrunk, what if you have edema, what if you have weight loss? All of these changes are very common in our patients, and it’s these kinds of distortions that we’ve never been able to handle before.”

Being able to handle it is what Robar calls the leap forward, taking just a few steps forward on his Friday night tour to the treatment room and the EthosTM therapy system, which is a less intimidating iteration of a CT scanner, and Robar’s patient, in in this case a medical manikin, lying on the treatment bed, ready to be inserted into the bore of the scanner.

“Six seconds,” Robar said of the time it would take the Ethos system to create an image of the patient, a three-dimensional cone-beam image of incredible quality.

“The previous generation of cone beam imaging technology took more than a minute.”

The image acquisition process can take place within a single breath, about 10 times faster than conventional linear accelerator-based imaging systems. This allows for the first time images obtained during normal treatment to be used for radiation dose distribution calculations. Such a calculation previously required a patient to make an additional trip to a separate CT scanner used for treatment simulation and planning.

“Some patients we treat with a breath hold,” Robar said. “Patients with lung tumors or liver tumors or cancer in the left chest, we ask the patient to hold their breath with a deep breath, and then we image them, and then we treat them in that position as well.”

Robar said patients can’t hold their breath for a full minute, so the process was to take small bits of the image in many different breath spaces.

“Not only is that inefficient, but the images don’t look as good as they could,” he said.

The $8 million project, backed by a generous $1 million donation from BMO Atlantic announced Friday evening, will make the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Center in Halifax the first hospital in the world to acquire images of human trial participants on an Ethos therapy system equipped with the new HyperSight imaging solution.

“The HyperSight is the pinnacle for me,” said Robar, referring to a recent European conference on radiation oncology.

“It was Nova Scotia on stage, teaching this to the whole world and showing the first images on a giant screen at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, images made here.”

The Ethos system is designed to enable clinical teams to deliver adaptive radiotherapy, which allows the clinician to adapt the patient’s treatment plan to changes in the tumor or surrounding tissue, in real time during a typical treatment appointment.

Work in the coming year will focus on two research trials targeting lung, breast, liver and head and neck cancers to understand the potential and develop protocols for this new technology.

Thereafter, and subject to regulatory approval from Health Canada, patient treatments will begin.

BMO’s donation will provide the QEII with an important opportunity to explore a potentially more accurate, personalized, efficient form of radiotherapy.

The acquisition of this breakthrough technology and the support of its world-class research program is the result of a collaboration between the QEII Foundation, Nova Scotia Health’s Innovation Hub and Varian Medical Systems.

This initiative is made possible thanks to $8 million in donations through the QEII Foundation’s We Are campaign, including the BMO grant, and $12 million in operational funding from the Province of Nova Scotia.

“With one in two Atlantic Canadians facing a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime, this is a matter that is deeply personal to our employees, customers and their families,” said Jason Scully, regional president of BMO Personal Banking Atlantic , announcing the donation Friday. “We are committed to supporting innovations that have the power to create positive change and drive progress in communities across Atlantic Canada.”

Susan Mullin, president and CEO of the QEII Foundation, said the BMO gift inspired others to give.

“For patients, access to Ethos therapy with the new HyperSight imaging technology could mean their radiation treatments could be more accurate than ever, creating the potential for fewer side effects and better outcomes,” Mullin said.

Dr. Gail Tomblin Murphy, vice president of research, innovation and discovery at Nova Scotia Health, said “the remarkable technology will truly change the lives of Nova Scotia.”

The QEII Foundation says half of patients diagnosed with cancer will need radiation at some point during their cancer journey.

The combination of advanced in-room imaging and adaptive radiotherapy could change the way the QEII will treat radiotherapy patients.

The foundation says delivering a highly targeted dose of radiation exactly where it is needed offers numerous benefits to patients and their families, including significantly improving the preservation of healthy tissue and reducing side effects, improving personalization and efficiency of treatment and in patient recruitment. and retaining leading physicians and employees who are drawn to academic health centers with the most advanced technology.