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International actress and cancer survivor Lisa Ray on Wednesday said she will ‘conquer’ the disease in her lifetime. Lisa recently inaugurated a cancer institute at Fortis Hospitals Ltd’s Mulund facility.
Malvinder M Singh and Lisa Ray
“Courage, fortitude and the right attitude towards life can overcome all odds. In any adverse situation people tend to give up but in my life and my fight against cancer I have learnt that by facing the challenge head on, hope can break through and win. It takes a lot of resilience to face such a situation in life but I believe nothing is impossible if we have the attitude to fight for it,” Lisa told reporters.
“I am happy to associate with Fortis Cancer Institute which has the best clinical talent and infrastructure to give patient the right care. I am also glad to associate with the group to extend my support for spreading awareness around cancer cure in our country. My motto is ‘never stop fighting’ and we will conquer cancer in our lifetime,” she added.
The Fortis Cancer Institute offers comprehensive customised, cancer treatment with dedicated consultants across Medical, Surgical and Radiation Oncology backed by the latest in Cancer Technology.
Malvinder M Singh, Group Chairman, Fortis Healthcare Group, said, “We are bringing renewed hope to cancer patients in Mumbai by providing diagnosis and treatment expertise with a human touch. Our Cancer Institute in Mumbai will expand the spectrum of our super specialty and provide unparalleled care to cancer patients with an integrated approach.”
“At Fortis Cancer Institute we will ensure that each patient receives compassionate care through the expertise of a responsive and experienced team of healthcare professionals. We are the first hospital in India to acquire the most sophisticated radiation therapy equipment -Elekta Synergy Linac with Volumetric Modulated ARC Therapy (VMAT) which can treat tumors and small lesions in the brain and other parts of the body quickly with precision.
Elekta Synergy Gallery
“VMAT technology helps target the treatment area more accurately and reduces treatment time by 35- 40%. This combines with sophisticated Oncentra Treatment Planning System which reduces the treatment planning substantially hence giving a faster turnaround time to patient and benefiting the patient in quick and customized treatment. We are the first ones to invest in this technology in the country,” said Vishal Bali, CEO Fortis Hospitals Ltd.Visit Elekta India – http://www.elektaindia.co.in
To read more visit – http://indianweekender.co.nz/Pages/ArticleDetails/16/1471/Bollywood/Will-conquer-cancer-Lisa-Ray
Don’t miss the fall issue of Wavelength, Elekta’s magazine focusing on news and advances in radiation therapy, information management and neuroscience from our customer partners worldwide. This issue discusses the
use of SBRT for inoperable lung tumors; the first sites to implement our new digital control system; IGRT innovations that manage respiratory motion; the frontline role Monaco® with VMAT plays at a cancer center in China; the value of Gamma Knife® surgery for optical pathway tumors—and that’s not all.
On page two, don’t miss an article highlighting the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center’s (UPMC) stereotactic radiosurgery program where clinicians—including spine SRS pioneer Peter C. Gerszten, M.D., M.P.H., Associate Professor of Neurological Surgery and Radiation Oncology—have had remarkable success using Elekta Synergy® S to treat spine and paraspinal lesions. Speaking of top physicians, you may recognize the name of Robert Timmerman, M.D., Professor of Radiation Oncology and Neurosurgery at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (page six), a customer who uses Elekta solutions with confidence in Gamma Knife surgery and lung SBRT.
On page 12, it also is our privilege to welcome Macquarie University Hospital (MUH) to the global Gamma Knife community! The first and only center in Australia capable of providing dedicated intracranial radiosurgery, MUH recently treated their first patient, a 33-year-old male with multiple brain tumors, with Leksell Gamma Knife® Perfexion™.
Dr. Patrick Cobb stood in amazement as hundreds of patients, friends and supporters flowed through the front doors
Elekta Synergy of the Frontier Cancer Center and Blood Institute Sunday afternoon.
Each who passed by were welcomed with a hug or handshake before roaming around the new $23 million cancer center where Cobb is a managing partner.
Crowds wandered through the radiology waiting room, passed the phlebotomy area and through various exam rooms.
The tour continued upstairs to the chemotherapy area and the outside deck area.
Formerly known as the Hematology Oncology Center of the Northern Rockies, which was located on North 30th Street, the new center has been three years in the making.
read more here – http://billingsgazette.com/news/local/article_d34298d2-b3f8-11df-b128-001cc4c002e0.html
The Frontier Cancer Center is equipped with MOSAIQ™ – Elekta’s Medical and Radiation Oncology Software and an Elekta Synergy Linac
Elekta VMAT (Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy) is Elekta’s next generation arc therapy technique that establishes new standards for radiation therapy treatment speed and dose reduction to the patient. With Elekta VMAT, single or multiple radiation beams sweep in uninterrupted arc(s) around the patient, dramatically speeding treatment delivery. Doctors can use Elekta VMAT with complete or partial arc(s) to reduce treatment times from the eight to twelve minutes required for “conventional” radiation therapy to as few as two minutes.
read more at http://www.elekta.com/VMAT
Fairmont Hotel
USAir from Philadelphia to Chicago for a Medical Oncology Advisory Board meeting and our Annual Medical Oncology Summit. The meeting was held at the Fairmont, a beautiful hotel near the Navy Pier. As usual, the slowest part of the trip was the leg between O’Hare and the city. Once there, Chicago is one of my favorites.
The Advisory Board Meeting was Wednesday, beginning bright and early and lasting through the day. Our Advisers are a terrific mix if professionals – Nurses, Pharmacists, Physicians, Administrators…. representing the spectrum of our US Medical Oncology user base. What an amazing day! Lots of great discussion with “Meaningful Use” and HITECH/ARRA the lead topic. As we prepare for the behemoth of this program, it is so clear to me how critically important this Advisory Board is to our success. It’s not just preparing MOSAIQ for certification, but also our customer base for what they’ll need to do to qualify. Spreading the word in every which way, including through this board, will be critical to success.
Lots of other topics were discussed, including QOPI support, our ever improving UI, some improvements in chemotherapy dose adjusting, and one of my favorite new MOSAIQ features – the availability of ALL MOSAIQ Assessment data elements as eScribe document merge fields. The MD’s will love this – it’s going to make their lives so much easier. The icing on the cake will be the ability to import, export and therefore share the assessment views and the eScribe templates. Both will be available in MOSAIQ 2.3, though Assessment import/export is available now. I don’t mean to sound too promotional here, but this one is really a biggie.
Through the course of the meeting, one statement in particular, made by Rajinder Dhada who has taken an interest in these meetings, is worth repeating here. “It’s the ultimate in adaptive therapy”, he said, with reference to a discussion on how on-the-fly changes to chemotherapy administration orders should be managed. That says it all.
The day was capped by dinner with our advisers in a hotel restaurant – dare I say – called “Aria”.
Our Advisers
A nice respite to end a long day’s work, even if the name wasn’t so fitting.
Next day began the Medical Oncology Summit meeting. I have to confess I was only able to stick my head in a few times over the day because of conflicting meetings, but what I saw was a real surprise. For the opening session, not only was it a bigger room than I had expected, but it was completely filled to near capacity – standing room only. Wow! I’m told it is our largest attendance thus far,
standing room only
and having been to most of these Annual Summits, I must say we’ve come a long way. No surprise that “Meaningful Use”, HITECH/ARRA were at the top of the list of interest. Yes, there are dollars at stake, but there are also important implications related to work flow, effects on patient chart access, physician order entry, decision support and many other issues. For the MOSAIQ product development group, it’s been the single highest priority.
Of course, there were lots of other interesting sessions including ones touching on survivorship, data visualization, clinical trial eligibility determination, billing… and the like. A great meeting with a great outcome, and I only hope we’ve not raised the bar too high.
I’m on vacation next week, but will sticking around the area. I will be visiting the White House during the week and bowling there (courtesy of some DC connections), so maybe will have a few words about that in my next blog.
Joel
Gamma Knife Center of Pacific, the Aloha State’s only dedicated intracranial radiosurgery facility, installs latest Gamma Knife model
Surrounded by thousands of square miles of ocean, Gamma Knife Center of the Pacific is the only Gamma Knife® center in Hawaii. Since 1998, Gamma Knife Center of the Pacific has treated more than 1,300 patients, offering residents a convenient treatment option and tourists a way to combine needed therapy with the pleasures of a paradise.
In August, the radiosurgery center will retire its first Leksell Gamma Knife system and begin operating Elekta’s latest generation radiosurgery system, Leksell Gamma Knife® Perfexion™. Gamma Knife radiosurgery is a gentler alternative to traditional brain surgery for illnesses such as metastatic disease, which is cancer that has travelled to the brain from elsewhere in the body. With pinpoint accuracy, the system delivers up to thousands of low-intensity radiation beams to one or more targets in a single session.Perfexion provides even greater speed and ease of use than previous models.
“Perfexion is a much faster, more efficient machine to treat multiple metastases in a single visit,” says Maurice Nicholson, M.D., neurosurgeon and the center’s medical director. “This is important because the pendulum is swinging toward treating with stereotactic radiosurgery [SRS] rather than whole brain radiation therapy [WBRT]. Studies have shown that there is decreased mental function at four months in a higher percentage of WBRT patients. Perfexion will be good for the patients and good for physicians.”
iViewC, Elekta’s new digital imaging system for use with Compact (our cost-effective linear accelerator for radiation therapy) has achieved CE marking. Utilizing CCD (charge couple device) technology, iViewC affords high quality, real-time images that verify the patient is in the correct position at the time of treatment. This helps to ensure patient safety and reduces margins during therapy delivery.
The digital architecture of iViewC ensures rapid patient set up and positioning, faster patient throughput and valuable workflow efficiencies compared to X-ray film, such as digital image storage and no waiting time between image acquisition and analysis. Based on the world-renowned iViewGT™ image evaluation software, iViewC harnesses advanced CCD camera technology to provide high quality, real-time images for accurate patient position verification at a cost-effective price.
The first iViewC for Elekta Compact was shipped to the Jose R. Reyes Memorial Medical Center in the Philippines. “The cost effective image-guidance capabilities offered by iViewC will enable workflow efficiency, higher patient throughput and cost savings,” says Erwin Q. Vito Cruz, Chairman, Department of Radiation Therapy, Jose R. Reyes Memorial Medical Center. “This is ideal for high-workload government institutions such as ours.”
*iViewC™ and Elekta Compact™ are not available for sale or distribution in all regions.
iViewC Patient Position Verification Solution Designed to Optimize Treatment Accuracy for Elekta Compact Radiation Therapy System
MEG White Paper 2010 Functional Brain Mapping with Magnetoencephalography James R. Petite Jr. Ph.D.
Elekta and Orasi Medical have released a white paper detailing the opportunity for utilizing magnetoencephalography (MEG) technology to accelerate the development of drugs to treat neurological disorders. The paper describes MEG technology, its current clinical and research use, illustrates the comparison of MEG to EEG and importantly demonstrates how MEG can improve and accelerate the development of Central Nervous System (CNS) drugs.
The release of the paper comes at a critical time. With the average duration to bring a CNS drug to market exceeding 12 years—and only seven percent of neurological drugs making it to market—pharmaceutical companies are looking for technologies to assess the effect of drugs earlier and more accurately in the development process. “There is a critical need for better tools to ascertain brain function in drug development, as well as novel biomarkers that identify neurological drug and disease signatures,” said Michael Gold, Vice President, GlaxoSmithKline.
“We have heard firsthand from pharmaceutical thought leaders that there is no one modality that solves the current needs in CNS clinical drug development,” said Stephen Otto, Chairman of Elekta’s Neuromag Business. “The technical advantages and patient-friendly qualities of MEG make it a natural fit for the measurement of CNS drugs.”
To read more about how this novel application of MEG can accelerate drug development, reduce costs and improve CNS drug innovation by measuring neurological drug effects and real-time brain function throughout key phases of the drug development process, click here: www.orasimedical.com/2010megwhitepaper.
Click this link To learn more about the Elekta Neuromeg
Neurosurgeon John Fuller, who will be using the Leksell Gamma Knife® Perfexion™ at Macquarie University Hospital in Sydney, says it’s much faster than traditional surgery.
“Although our first patient has tumours in multiple parts of his brain, we’ll only need to do one operation lasting an hour or so,” said Dr Fuller,
“The patient will be awake through the entire procedure and will only receive a local anaesthetic. It will be possible for him to go home tonight.”
The Leksell Gamma Knife will save money as well as lives, Dr Fuller says, referring to one study which found it can free up to 700 intensive care beds a year.
Click this image to view the Australian Gamma Knife video on Ten.com.au
View a video of Dr. Fuller talking about the Leksell Gamma Knife
Read more on this Story here : http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-national/gamma-knife-zaps-brain-tumours-surgeons-20100803-114ei.html
or here: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/health/7939294/thats-not-a-knife-its-a-ray-gun
Watch Additional Videos from the 1st Australian Leksell Gamma Knife here
- Largest Neurosurgical Center in Russia Acquires Elekta’s Leksell Gamma Knife Perfexion February 6, 2012Russia’s first Leksell Gamma Knife® Perfexion™ system has found a home at the renowned N.N. Burdenko Neurosurgical Institute, just a five-minute car ride from Moscow’s Red Square. On June 2, 2011, a 59-year-old woman was the first Perfexion patient, receiving Gamma Knife® radiosurgery to treat tumor tissue that remained following open surgery. Now, eight mon […]
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