In its ongoing mission to provide the highest quality patient care in the greater Geneva area, private healthcare provider Hôpital de La Tour (Switzerland) expanded its practice with a new oncology center offering medical oncology and radiotherapy services.
Physicist Grégory Bolard – who spearheaded establishment of the new radiotherapy department – was determined to make MRI accessible for precise radiotherapy planning for La Tour’s radiotherapy patients. His team’s ambition was to adopt MR simulation to better delineate targets and identify OARs, and to streamline the MR-based planning process via MR-only radiotherapy planning. La Tour radiation oncologists Dr. Champion and Dr. Breuneval report that their MR-RT workflows are paying off in improved contouring for radiotherapy plans and a fast simulation process for pelvic cases.
“La Tour’s administration and clinicians appreciated that MRI is a must-have for modern radiotherapy”
“Patient well-being is a central theme in our department”
This shared-use model has made MRI economically affordable for us”
MR-based target contouring on 3D T2W TSE in transversal, sagittal
and coronal planes.
As a private institution we aim to offer both the best treatment and the best patient experience, MR-only radiotherapy makes so much sense in this respect”
The erectile plexus and mesorectum are much better visualized on MRI than on CT. The same applies to the cranial limit of penile bulb, where we can more confidently spare this sensitive structure”
“We save more than an hour-and-a-half in plan preparation”
“Compressed SENSE improves patient comfort and workflow efficiency with no change in image quality”
“We have benefited not only from more precise tumor delineation and better OAR sparing, but also the elimination of the uncertainties of image fusion is particularly important.”
MR-only simulation is a paradigm shift in radiotherapy planning and I foresee it becoming progressively more widespread globally”
1. Evaluation of iCBCT, a new CBCT iterative reconstruction algorithm: potential imaging dose reduction and evaluation of dose calculation accuracy in the pelvic area. Poster discussion SASRO (Scientific Association of Swiss Radiation Oncology), 2019.
2. Clinical commissioning of MR-Only Prostate treatment planning workflow. Presentation SASRO (Scientific Association of Swiss Radiation Oncology), 2016.
3. Clinical commissioning of MR-Only Prostate treatment planning workflow. G. Bolard. ePoster, AAPM. 08/01/16; 136287; 33547.
4. Dosimetric accuracy of MRCAT Pelvis, an MR-only simulation method for RT planning in the pelvic area [1388-PO]. Poster, ESTRO, 2020.
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