Sun Nuclear Sells 1000th SRS MapCHECK

Ten years ago, when I was working on my MBA, my fellow classmates were intrigued by the industry I worked in. They would talk about reaching their millions of customers and I would say, ‘yeah, we have approximately 13,000 customers worldwide.’ They would say how they reached a milestone of selling their one millionth or even larger number of whatever widgets they sold, and I would talk about how if you could sell 1,000 of a product in our market that was huge. They had a hard time getting their heads around it, and I wondered what it would be like to have all those customers.

I started working in the radiation treatment quality assurance (RTQA) market over 21 years ago. One of the things that struck me almost immediately as I learned about the business was the passion that medical physicists had for their work. When explaining what I do for a living to a new acquaintance I often say, “I work with professionals called medical physicists. Basically, they are all as smart as Einstein, and their job, put as simply as possible, is to make sure that if you receive radiation treatments for something like cancer, you will get the right dose in the right place. They do incredibly important work, but most people have no idea they exist.” Invariably after I say that the person will share a story about a relative, a friend, a co-worker that has been treated for cancer. It never ceases to amaze me how significant the work of a medical physicist is. ??

During my first 18 years in this industry, I watched Sun Nuclear evolve and grow into the company it is today. Jeff Simon tried to recruit me several times during those years, but it didn’t work out until 2020. By then, Sun Nuclear was the number one supplier of RTQA solutions in the industry. They accomplished this by providing innovative products that were both accurate and efficient, allowing you, our customers and partners, to do the essential work of ensuring safe and effective treatments while still maintaining a semblance of a normal work-life balance. A key example of this is the SRS MapCHECK, introduced in 2018, and which recently reached the accomplishment of 1,000 devices sold.

Medical Physicists understand better than anyone the required features that would make the best SRS specific patient QA device. So, when we were ready to start developing the SRS MapCHECK we went straight to the source. Following are just a couple of the many innovative features that came from that collaboration. A huge thank you is owed to our customers and partners that helped make this device such a remarkable success.

The first requirement was resolution. This meant packing dosimeters, in this case SunPoint?2 diodes, closer than they ever had been. But how close was the question? The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem provided the answer. Using typical stereotactic dose distributions, the theorem showed that a spacing of 2.5mm (the actual spacing is 2.47mm) would achieve the resolution necessary, a fact that has been verified by several publications.?[1]?[2]?[3] Recently a yet unpublished study sought to determine if doubling the density of the diodes on the SRS MapCHECK would improve results, only to show that even with twice the data points there was no difference in gamma passing rates. In fact, the research showed that at the higher density, sensitivity may be too high and result in false negatives, requiring users to adjust their thresholds to discover issues.

The second requirement was ease of use. To achieve the 2.47mm detector spacing, two opposing circuit boards are interlaced and sandwiched together. This technique provides the SRS MapCHECK with one of its many unique (and patented) features – the ability to determine the angle of incidence of the beam on the array and correct for angular dependence independent of another auxiliary device like an inclinometer. This makes the SRS MapCHECK the only fully self-contained TG-218 compatible stereotactic array on the market and that has helped it become known as the ‘Gold Standard’ for SRS QA.

A good case in point is when Rebecca Culcasi and her colleagues developed a TG-119 approach to stereotactic radiosurgery commissioning they chose the Sun Nuclear StereoPHAN and SRS MapCHECK to analyze the results. Their test cases include a range of plans from “a simple spherical target at the central axis to a complex clinical scenario treating off-axis targets including an acoustic neuroma abutting the brainstem and lesion abutting the optic nerve.”?[4] It is also the reason that Chris Bowen, who until recently was the sole medical physicist at a busy two accelerator site, stated “I might run into a burning building for the SRS MapCHECK. It keeps us safe in a way we really weren’t safe before.” Now that he has a junior physicist maybe he would send them in after it instead.

These are just a few of the reasons that tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of stereotactic treatment plans have been verified with the SRS MapCHECK. With over 1,000 devices being used in the market, sites that are introducing or growing their SRS programs can have the confidence and rely on the experience of these sites and the medical physicists that have gone before them. If you are working in one of those programs, contact Sun Nuclear today and set up a demo to learn about the many more impressive features of the array. I promise you won’t be disappointed.

References

[1] R. Popple et al., "Evaluation of a two-dimensional diode array for patient-specific quality assurance of HyperArc," J Appl Clin Med Phy, pp. 1-8, 2021.

[2] M. Rose et al., "Multi-institution validation of a new high spatial resolution diode array forSRS and SBRT plan pretreatment quality assurance," Med Phys, pp. 3153-3164, 2020.

[3] M. Tutty et al., "Error detection thresholds of diode detector arrays in SRT patient specific QA," in ESTRO, Dublin, 2022.

[4] R. Culcasi, G. Baran, M. Dominello and J. Burmeister, "Stereotactic radiosurgery commissioning and QA test cases—A TG-119 approach for Stereotactic radiosurgery," Medical Physics, pp. 1-12, 2021.

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