GMV’s surgical navigator opens up its range to take in vertebral cancers

Under the Mannheim Molecular Intervention Environment (MO2LIE) project, brokered by the “Research Campus – Public-Private Partnership for Innovation” (Forschungscampus), GMV is adapting its surgical navigator for the treatment of vertebral metastases. GMV’s navigator has been successfully used for a couple of years to treat breast tumors in the Hospital Doctor Negrín of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria.

To adapt its navigator to this new challenge GMV is now collaborating with the University Hospital of Mannheim. As a leading light in oncology this hospital is the main coordinator of clinical trials to vet the efficiency of Carl Zeiss Meditec’s tumor eradication treatment. Carl Zeiss Meditec, a GMV client, is world leader in medical technology and supplier of the Intrabeam device for applying intraoperative radiotherapy with low-energy X-ray photons, now being marketed jointly with GMV’s inhouse intraoperative radiotherapy planner, radiance™.

The first working meeting to drive the integration and validation of GMV’s navigator in the University Hospital of Mannheim was held in Spain between the medical physicists of the German hospital, Frank Schneider and Luis Probst; the team of Hospital Doctor Negrín of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria and GMV’s technical team led by Carlos Illana. Some of the most important strong points recognized by the German specialists were “its user friendliness and direct interoperability with radiance™, which allow for “online” adaptation corrected by tissue heterogeneity and individual 3D patient planning in intraoperative radiation therapy (IORT). This raises IORT to the next level of precise patient treatment”.

The working session wound up with a visit to San Roque Hospital, whose oncology team is led by the chair-holding professor of radiology and physical medicine of the Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Pedro Lara.

Some of the other participants in the MO2LIE project for research into innovative tumor therapy by means of molecular intervention, besides GMV, are Mannheim Hospital, Carl Zeiss Meditec, Siemens Healthcare and Kuka. GMV’s work in this project centers on improving radiance-based preplanning of surgery, and treatment assistance using its navigation system.