Radiosurgery Service Helps Treat More Patients

A new radiotherapy service will allow medical centers to access a dedicated team of remote scientists specializing in CyberKnife radiosurgery treatment planning, thereby giving each center the flexibility and capacity to treat more patients without altering their staffing.

Accuray, Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA, USA), a developer in the field of radiosurgery, reported that the company would begin offering a treatment planning service to new and existing CyberKnife customers.

"Accuray's treatment planning service will help our customers control costs and increase their patient throughput, while also helping Accuray to enhance its recurring revenue,” said Euan S. Thomson, Ph.D., president and CEO of Accuray. "Our data indicate that our users will treat more than 20,000 patients during the 2008 calendar year. At current reimbursement levels, that translates into a potential market opportunity of more than
US$50 million. As more CyberKnife Systems are installed and treatment numbers increase, the market will continue to expand.”

Georgetown University Hospital's (Washington, DC, USA) CyberKnife Center, one of the top five busiest CyberKnife Centers in the world, has already signed on for Accuray's new treatment planning service. Treatment planning services are approved for reimbursement through Medicare and other private carriers.

"We're looking forward to utilizing Accuray's treatment planning service to enhance our operational effectiveness and address the global shortage of medical physicists paired with the growing demand for CyberKnife radiosurgery,” said Linda F. Winger, vice president of professional services and research administration at Georgetown University Hospital. "The treatment planning service will allow our physicists to focus on our long-term growth and quality of care by transferring the time-consuming daily task of treatment planning to an external team of experts.”

Accuray's treatment planning service will also enable new customers to begin delivering CyberKnife treatments earlier by allowing their in-house staff to focus on the important role of site commissioning and quality assurance while transferring the planning component to Accuray's treatment planning group's Board-Certified medical physicists.

The CyberKnife robotic radiosurgery system is the world's only robotic radiosurgery system designed to treat tumors anywhere in the body non-invasively. Using continual image guidance technology and computer controlled robotic mobility, the CyberKnife System automatically tracks, detects, and corrects for tumor and patient movement in real-time throughout the treatment. This enables the CyberKnife System to deliver high-dose radiation with pinpoint precision, which minimizes damage to surrounding healthy tissue and eliminates the need for invasive head or body stabilization frames.

Accuray develops and markets the CyberKnife robotic radiosurgery system, which extends the benefits of radiosurgery to include extracranial tumors, including those in the spine, lung, prostate, liver, and pancreas. To date, the CyberKnife System has been used to treat more than 40,000 patients worldwide, and currently more than 100 systems have been installed in leading hospitals in the Americas, Europe, and Asia.


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