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New Company Forms With Support From UPMC Health System; Telemedicine Venture to Revolutionize Patient Access to Advanced Radiotherapy.

Article Excerpt
PITTSBURGH -- Leading experts in radiation therapy today announced the formation of a new company, D3 Advanced Radiation Planning Services, that will greatly improve patient access to a promising cancer treatment called IMRT, or intensity modulated radiation therapy. Co-founded by UPMC Health System, D3 will enable UPMC to rapidly implement IMRT throughout its extensive network of cancer centers that treat more than 25,000 patients annually.

IMRT is a state-of-the-art technology that enables clinicians to potentially improve outcomes for cancer patients by delivering extremely precise and shaped doses of radiation while protecting surrounding healthy tissue. A vast improvement over standard radiation, IMRT allows delivery of higher radiation doses to destroy cancer cells while minimizing normal tissue doses, thus limiting the adverse side effects from treatment.

Using software from Varian Medical Systems , D3 will provide UPMC Cancer Centers with patient treatment plans over a telecommunications network as well as training and other medical physics services needed for IMRT. It will ultimately offer its services to hospitals and freestanding clinics across the nation. The result will be to give cancer clinics and patients easier and more rapid access to this advanced form of radiation therapy.

While the adoption rate of IMRT has been rapid, less than 5 percent of the world's radiotherapy centers are now treating cancer patients with this technique. Establishing IMRT services requires physics expertise and sophisticated treatment planning capabilities as well as linear accelerators to administer the treatment.

To implement advanced radiation therapy, including IMRT, UPMC has signed an agreement with Varian Medical Systems to supply equipment, including state- of-the-art linear accelerators, as well as software, for all of the UPMC Cancer Centers. Economies of scale will be achieved by centralizing IMRT treatment planning through D3's telecommunications network. The new radiation therapy equipment and software, and the telecommunications...

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