Beds – Invalid bed or surgical support – Adapted for imaging
Patent
1998-06-03
1999-11-16
Melius, Terry Lee
Beds
Invalid bed or surgical support
Adapted for imaging
5 811R, 5628, 5621, A47B 1300, A47B 700, A47B 100, A61G 708
Patent
active
059834242
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND AND SUMMARY
The present invention relates to a device for repositioning with high accuracy a patient's skeleton and the area in the patient's body that is to be subjected to treatment, the position of the area being previously determined, for example by means of angiogram, PET, DSA, CT, MRI or X-ray equipment.
In radiotherapy as well as in surgical operations, the possibility of identifying the target area with great accuracy is highly important. To minimize the risk, the surgeon must be sure of hitting the correct area in the treatment.
It is vital that the treatment area can be easily and safely identified on different occasions, since, for example, fractionated radiation treatment requires a number of successive treatment sessions.
In radiation treatment of cancer, the intended tumor dose is given as repeated small radiotherapy doses during several weeks. It is thus important that in each treatment session the tumor in the patient is correctly positioned relative to the radiation field of the radiotherapy apparatus.
The prevalent method for positioning a patient's skeleton (body) is that the skin of the part of the body that is to be subjected to radiotherapy is marked with a felt-tip pen, with or without supplementary tattoo points. By means of skin marks and laser position beams, the nurse oncologist tries to arrange the patient in the correct position on the radiotherapy table in each treatment session. There is a drawback of the skin as outer reference for the tumor lying inside the body. The skin is elastic and moves freely relative to the parts of the skeleton. The movement of the skin with the uncertain position of the skin marks in relation to the parts of the skeleton makes it necessary to use safety margins on the radiation fields such that the tumor is not positioned outside the radiation field during treatment. The increased sizes of the fields result in normal tissues without cancer being unnecessarily irradiated. This causes higher radiation energy to the body and may lead to undesired side-effects of the radiotherapy. By irradiating greater volumes than necessary, the total radiation dose cannot in certain positions be increased to the desired level. It is desirable that adjustments of the patient's position on the radiotherapy table can be made more exactly.
A plurality of equipment and techniques are available to reduce deviations in the positioning of a patient, so-called fixtures such as masks, bite blocks, straps, plastic shells etc. The fixation aids should be usable in connection with the computerised axial tomography, the simulator and in the therapy room without affecting the levelling base or the radiotherapy. The problem with the fixation aids is that the patient who lies down in a fixture may on his own lie with his skeleton parts rotating in his own subcutaneous fat while the skin owing to its elasticity can be stretched in different directions, which results in the skin marks not representing the original position in relation to the tumor.
One object of the present invention is to provide a positioning device having high accuracy in identifying the target area.
A further object of the invention is to provide a positioning device which permits reliable and repeatable identification of the treatment area.
According to the invention, these objects are achieved by a device as described by way of introduction, which is characterized in that the device comprises a non-yielding, upright and radioparent panel element and a base plate, which in a substantially perpendicular fashion is fixedly connected to said panel element, of which at least the panel element comprises fixation means for fixing the patient in a given, essentially upright orientation to the panel element, and that the device also comprises wheel means mounted on the base plate for moving the panel element and the patient to a radiotherapy table, a tilting and conveying assembly being arranged at the end of the table for tilting the panel element together with the patient from the upright orientation to a
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Elekta AB
Hewitt James M.
Melius Terry Lee
LandOfFree
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