Varian’s IDENTIFY surface-guided radiotherapy (SGRT) system enables fast, highly precise motion management during delivery of a wide range of treatments and techniques, including linear accelerator-based stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT), and breath hold.
The IDENTIFY system helps to enhance confidence with features such as submillimeter accuracy, automated beam hold and couch shifts,* and consistent and personalized workflows, enabling clinicians to focus directly on their patients. IDENTIFY is integrated across the Varian ecosystem to ensure the continued compatibility of new releases.
Radiosurgery can be a complex treatment technique where accurate and efficient treatments are of utmost importance .
“The IDENTIFY system empowers clinicians with real-time patient tracking, helping to ensure exact positioning while automatically pausing the beam if movement exceeds tolerance limits,” said Sasa Mutic, PhD, President, Radiation Oncology Solutions for Varian. “This is especially valuable during frameless radiosurgery treatments on the Varian Edge radiosurgery or TrueBeam systems where IDENTIFY adds a critical layer of safety, while seeking to enhance confidence, treatment precision, and peace of mind.”
Clinicians at the Springfield Clinic Cancer Center at HSHS St. John’s Hospital in Springfield, Illinois, treat about 50 patients a day using Edge radiosurgery and TrueBeam systems equipped with high-definition multileaf collimators, and a Siemens Somaton for CT imaging. All three systems are equipped with the IDENTIFY system.
“With our current setup, we can treat anything from conventionally fractionated 3D radiotherapy, through stereotactic lung, prostate, and multiple brain metastases,” explained Springfield Clinic’s medical physicist, Matthew Riblett, PhD, DABR. “Our specialty is multi-metastases radiosurgery, evenly split between single fraction and up to five fractions. Of the 1,400 patients Springfield Clinic physicians treat each year, about 100 require SRS.”
The Springfield Clinic’s use of the IDENTIFY system for patient alignment and surface guidance, including automated beam hold,** is supporting the clinic’s push toward more advanced treatments, while the consistent accuracy of the system gives Dr. Riblett and his team peace of mind.
“Having a feature-complete surface guidance system that meets all of our needs has been very effective in helping us improve our workflows,” Dr. Riblett said. “We have a strong confidence in IDENTIFY’s ability to detect positional deviations during treatment, and routinely verify that this remains true. As a result, we’ve been able to facilitate a tattoo-less workflow for all of our patients and reduce treatment imaging because we no longer need to take additional films to verify patients were in the right position—IDENTIFY does an excellent job of that.”
For Springfield Clinic, use of the IDENTIFY system has enabled significant time savings for SRS treatments—from 45 minutes or more, down to 12 minutes in most cases, and from 35 minutes down to 15 minutes for conventionally fractionated treatments, according to Dr. Riblett. These time savings can be widely attributed to the reduced need for extra imaging between fields as IDENTIFY gives the Center the ability to continuously monitor the patient throughout treatment delivery.
“We went through the process of credentialling our SRS service to ensure that we are dosimetrically precise and incorporated the IDENTIFY system into the process for continual positional verifications during treatment,” Dr. Riblett explained. “Results showed we were spot on in terms of output and accuracy, giving us the confidence that our approach is both effective and safe. Now, we’re super comfortable treating those complex, high-risk, high-reward cases, and exploring additional techniques, such as DIBH.”
Learn more about the IDENTIFY system.
WATCH: Learn more about Varian’s Radiosurgery Solutions in our MyVarian webinar series.
*Only available on TrueBeam, Edge, and VitalBeam systems equipped with Varian’s Motion Management Interface (MMI).
**CE marked and FDA 510(k) cleared. The products/features mentioned here are not commercially available in all countries. Their future availability cannot be guaranteed.
The information captured herein represents the genuine experience of the attributed individuals and may not necessarily represent the views of Varian or the above-referenced institutions. In addition, the results reported by early adopters here were not generated as part of a formal controlled study. They were achieved in these customers’ unique clinical settings. Because there is no “typical” clinical setting and many variables exist, there is no guarantee that other customers will achieve the same results.
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(1) Bolten JH, Dunst J, Siebert FA. Geometric accuracy in patient positioning for stereotactic radiotherapy of intracranial tumors. Phys Imaging Radiat Oncol. 2023 Jun 23;27:100461. doi: 10.1016/j.phro.2023.100461. PMID: 37720460; PMCID: PMC10500024.
