E! ITEA3, STARLIT

Important results from the project

The purpose of the STARLIT project was to develop new methods to enable realtime adaptation of radiotherapy treatments of moving targets. The methods supports delivery, monitoring and quality assurance of the radiation treatment. C-rad has further developed their products to fulfill requirements for a camera based, redundant patient monitoring for an MR linac. The end goal of the project was to demonstrate a prototype of these methods on Elekta Unity, a linear accelerator with an integrated MR camera. The integration was successful and was demonstrated to ITEA on September 24th 2020.

Expected long term effects

The prototype that was generated fulfilled the requirements to continuously adapt the irradiation during the treatment with a delay of less than 500 ms. In a clinical implementation this is expected to lead to a higher precision of delivered dose with a smaller risk for negative side effects for the patient with shorter treatment times and fewer treatment occasions that is beneficial both for the patient and for a more efficient use of resources at the hospitals. A new 3D scanner, Catalyst+, has been developed during the project.

Approach and implementation

Elekta had several partial deliverables to ensure that the project progressed according to plan with the promised performance. Prior to the final demonstration, Elekta collaborated with other project members (UMC Utrecht, Uppsala University Hospital (Akademiska Sjukhuset), Elekta Canada and Modus QA) to successfully join the different members’ contributions to a successful demonstration. C-rad developed quality assurance of real time controlled radiotherapy, in-vivo measurements of dose in collaboration with NKI (NL), and camera based verification of patient position.