Varian is today (Wednesday, October 3, 2018) announcing the installation of a cloud-hosted deployment of the Varian Eclipse™ treatment planning system and Velocity™ oncology imaging informatics system across five Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre (Peter Mac) sites in Victoria, Australia.

Peter Mac is one of the world’s leading cancer research, education and treatment centres. It operates Australia’s only public hospital dedicated to caring for people living with cancer in Melbourne and provides radiation therapy services from suburban and regional sites.

The partnership with Varian means Peter Mac now has a unified radiotherapy treatment planning and oncology imaging informatics system across its campuses, providing patients with access to advanced radiotherapy treatments and longitudinal follow up of their medical images.

Nilgun Touma, Director of Radiation Therapy Services at Peter Mac said, “Eclipse will support the radiation oncology team to develop tailored treatment regimens – a task that requires absolute confidence in the accuracy of patient data and efficiency of planning workflows.

“Up until recently, Peter Mac ran multiple treatment planning systems across its five radiation therapy sites. Now, with Eclipse being live, we’ll be improving efficiency for our team and improving timeliness to care for patients at all Peter Mac locations.”

Varian designed Eclipse to streamline the creation of optimal treatment plans personalised for each patient by combining patient-specific anatomy with the best practice clinical knowledge of the institution. Multiple sources of information can be consolidated into a single comprehensive data repository, stored in Microsoft Azure and available for approximately 100 Eclipse concurrent users.

This provides Peter Mac with an increasingly comprehensive set of patient data from which its clinicians may draw insights to uniquely devise the preferred treatment strategy for an individual patient as well as continually evolving the best practices for managing patient cohorts of similar conditions.

Chris Cowley, Managing Director of Varian said, “In treatment planning, the radiation dose calculation has historically taken significant time. With Eclipse, the system can use graphical processing units (GPUs) that result in very fast dose calculation – resulting in significant time efficiency for Peter Mac as their GPUs reside in the cloud.”

Collaboration with Microsoft during deployment of the new cloud-based system provides the quality and security features of the Azure cloud.

Dr Nic Woods, Health Industry Executive for Microsoft Australia stated, “We’re delighted to have been working in partnership with such an innovative team at Varian. Seeing the cutting-edge treatment solutions that they are bringing to improve the delivery of care of patients around Australia is exactly the kind of partnership that Microsoft wants to build.”

“The combination of Varian’s expertise in radiation oncology and the Microsoft Azure cloud’s resilience, performance, security and scale are a winning combination for Peter Mac,” Chris Cowley added. “Because this is a cloud-based solution, it will grow with Peter Mac and they will gain quick access to important innovative updates.”

Eclipse integrates with Peter Mac’s 16 Varian linear accelerators.