The Princess Margaret “Transformers”

26 PRINCESS MARGARET CANCER CENTRE To have precise radiation treatment, you have to be able to see a tumour so you can accurately target it. Hence the need to obtain images from a patient and proceed with treatment in a timely manner. To solve this problem, a team at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre developed the MRgRT concept–a facility combining the power of MR imaging with radiation treatment. Putting these structures into the same space allows patients to be scanned and treated in a short time frame, without having to leave the facility. That’s exactly what is happening today at The Princess Margaret, where patients have been regularly treated in the MRgRT suite since 2014. “It gives us a window, an ability to see things that we were never able to see before, and that opens up opportunities,” says Dr. Michael Milosevic Director of Research, The Princess Margaret’s Radiation Medicine Program. WE BUILT: The MRgRT is anchored around a magnetic resonance scanner that can move between a pair of radiation suites via rails that are mounted on the ceiling. This allows patients to be scanned and treated in the same facility rather than having to visit two or three different locations to achieve the same result. Dr. Milosevic points out that the imaging alone is not what makes this facility so beneficial for patients. It’s the precision of the imaging and how closely it’s integrated with the treatment. That gives doctors, medical physicists, and radiation therapists the information they need to treat the cancer. The MRgRT allows us to explore personalized approaches where we take images just before treatment, design the radiation plan, and treat a patient in ways that could never have been achieved before. The more the MRgRT is used to treat patients, the more we learn to help future patients. That’s because the data captured through treatments provides new information about how tumours change with time and during treatment. MAGNETIC RESONANCE-GUIDED RADIATION THERAPY (MRgRT) 1.5T MR SIMULATION ROOM EXTERNAL BEAM RT ROOM CONTROL ROOM BRACHYTHERAPY ROOM MAGNET MOVER MAGNETIC RESONANCE-GUIDED RADIATION THERAPY - MRgRT