Wednesday, March 25, 2015

"Breathe well" biofeed-back device for better imaging and radiotherapy

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.