Kilovoltage Intrafraction Monitoring (KIM)
Real-time cancer targeting on a standard linear accelerator.
The Problem
- The human body is a dynamic system
- Tumours moves during radiotherapy treatment.
- Standard treatment does not consider motion during irradiation
Our solution
- Real-time tumour motion monitoring on a standard linear accelerator
- Purely software solution
- 6 degrees of freedom monitoring: sub-mm and sub-degree accuracy
How KIM works
Intellectual Property
Three granted US patents
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- US 8379794: Method to estimate position, motion of a target with a single X-ray imager
- US 9084888: Segmentation method
- US 9314219: Estimation of real-time rotation and translation of a target with a single X-ray imager
Clinical trials
| Trial name | Description | Status/Findings |
| KIM Pilot for localised prostate cancer | Single institution study with KIM (NCT01742403) | Funded by Cancer Australia.
55 patients treated to date. |
| Stereotactic Prostate Adaptive Radiotherapy using KIM (SPARK) | Multi-centre Cancer Australia-funded trial with KIM (NCT02397317) | Funded by Cancer Australia.
46/48 patients treated. Two first in human papers (6DoF and beam tracking). |
Conclusions and future work
Kilovoltage Intrafraction Monitoring is a novel real-time tumour localization modality which has successfully been implemented clinically on a patient cohort of 10 patients. Several advantages of Kilovoltage Intrafraction Monitoring include:
- Being the most accurate real-time tumour localization modality in the world so far (0.46 mm)
- Low barrier to clinical implementation
- Widespread applicability
However, one disadvantage of Kilovoltage Intrafraction Monitoring is that it delivers kilovoltage dose to the patient.
Kilovoltage Intrafraction Monitoring allows for the position of the tumour to be determined in real-time. This information can be used to adapt to the motion of the tumour via several strategies. Some of these strategies include radiation beam gating and real-time tumour tracking.
Research Opportunities
For more information and enquiries contact Professor Paul Keall