12 INNOVATION AT RAYSEARCH
JOINED-UP THINKING IN PROTON THERAPY With dedicated clinical facilities proliferating, proton therapy is fast becoming a standard treatment option in radiation oncology – the result of a dose distribution that sees the radiation payload deposited over a narrow depth range with reduced collateral damage to adjacent healthy tissue and nearby organs at risk. Martin Janson, RaySearch’s senior product manager for proton therapy, explains why sustained, user-driven software innovation makes RayStation®* the treatment planning system (TPS) of choice for established and new-entrant proton treatment centers.
Janson, who has been part of the RaySearch ® development team for 14 years, interprets his product management role on an expansive canvas. For starters, he’s the company’s internal domain expert for all things proton therapy – responsible for prioritizing new proton requirements from customers and partners and feeding those requests into the RayStation development roadmap. At the same time, he’s active along several other coordinates, whether that’s supporting the development teams; training service team colleagues on new proton therapy features in RayStation; working closely with sales and marketing on customer engagement and education; or talking to proton clinics about ideas for joint R&D projects. A BIG YEAR FOR PROTONS “RaySearch has been extremely successful with proton therapy innovations for RayStation,” explains Janson, “and 2020 was especially notable in this regard, reinforcing our position as the TPS market-leader for proton planning.” A case in point is the latest iteration of the software’s Monte Carlo dose calculation engine which, thanks to its graphics processing unit (GPU)-based implementation, offers accurate and extremely fast dose computations – typically less than five seconds. “The GPU is fantastic at parallel pro* Subject to regulatory clearance in some markets.
cessing and represents a revolution in performance for our proton Monte Carlo dose engine,” notes Janson. “Those ultrafast computation times enable robust evaluation of multiple treatment plans and, ultimately, a more personalized solution for every patient.” Another significant milestone in 2020 was the launch of RayOcular to support the complex planning requirements when using proton therapy to treat rare eye cancers. While this is a niche application just now, clinical interest is ticking up. “RayOcular will improve the planning and outcomes for clinics that have worked with proton-based treatments of eye cancers for many years,” says Janson. The breakthrough is adding MR and CT capabilities into the mix so that clinical users can decrease their margins to ensure better sparing and reduced toxicity – capabilities that should in turn encourage new players to adopt proton therapy for the treatment of ocular cancers. The release of RayStation 10B* at the end of last year also saw the software’s machine learning capabilities extended to support the automated planning of pencilbeam-scanned proton treatments. In other words: oneclick automated planning to generate treatment plans with
