Sydney: The National Health and Medical Research Council has funded clinical
trials of a medical device that delivers better targeted radiotherapy
for people with lung, breast and abdominal cancers. Developed by a team from the University of Sydney, the 'Breathe Well' biofeedback device improves medical imaging and the pinpoint delivery of radiotherapy. "Every breath we take is different and unpredictable," says Paul Keall,Director of the Radiation Physics Laboratory at the University of Sydney. "When
we're imaging cancers that are moving due to breathing, then this
irregularity causes … errors in the images that we are using to target
the cancer with radiation."
The biofeedback device helps patients breathe more regularly while undergoing imaging and radiotherapy -
It
does this by producing two images on a screen - a graphical
representation of their usual, regular breathing pattern, and an image
of their real-time breathing.
The patient watches the screen
during imaging and radiotherapy and tries to match their breathing to
their observed breathing profile.
"They essentially play a game to
match their current breathing signal to the target wave form which has
been selected for them," Professor Keall says.
Nine times out of
ten, the mere act of breathing normally leads to significant imaging
errors in the diagnosis and treatment planning for thoracic and
abdominal cancers.
Dangerously, this often leads to imprecise
radiation treatment because the beam will miss part of the tumour and
hit surrounding healthy tissue instead.
Imprecise radiation
treatment due to unpredictable breathing affects 5,000 lung cancer
patients in Australia and an estimated 650,000 million lung cancer
patients globally every year.
Helping patients breathe in a more
predictable pattern improves the accuracy of imaging and the
effectiveness of radiotherapy by increasing the amount of radiation that
hits a tumour. It also reduces side effects because less radiation
reached healthy tissue.
The new NHMRC grant will help the
University of Sydney team led by professor Keall to conduct trials of
the device in Australia, Europe, Asia and the United States over the
next three years. It will also support further product development with a
view to making the device widely available.
The device is expected to improve treatment of lung, breast, liver, pancreas and kidney cancers.
The
team's grant is one of 18 NHMRC grants worth $12.9M awarded to
University of Sydney researchers. These grants provided in the latest
funding round are intended to help translate treatments from an idea in
the lab to commercially viable products.
The grants are part of
$123.5M in total NHMRC funding that will also support early career
researchers and a range of collaborative projects.