AUSTRALIAN SAFETY AGENCY ORDERS ELEKTA SYNERGY® AS GOLD STANDARD FOR CALIBRATION AND DOSIMETRY

Press Release
Stockholm, Sweden, May 19, 2008

Elekta, world-leading provider of radiation therapy and radiosurgery solutions, is pleased to announce that the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) has joined other world-class physics standards centers with its order of an Elekta linear accelerator. ARPANSA will accept delivery of an Elekta Synergy® system this summer, and will utilize the Elekta system’s high level of stability for its national physics measurements.

“It’s very gratifying to add another prestigious physics standards laboratory to our group of Elekta users, who are so confident in the stability of Elekta Synergy that they chose our product to benchmark even non-clinical equipment and the equipment of other manufacturers,” says Kevin Brown, Ph.D. and Advanced Research Director at Elekta. “To have Elekta equipment serve not only as innovative solutions for treating serious disease, but also as global gold standards for accuracy in physics, is a testimony to the reliability of these systems.”

Dr. Brown adds that Elekta Synergy and other systems in Elekta’s portfolio of digital linear accelerators are traveling wave accelerators that use a magnetron as the microwave source. Other commercially available linear accelerators use a standing wave/klystron configuration.

ARPANSA joins several other centers that have acquired Elekta equipment for testing: The National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the U.K., The National Research Council (NRC) in Ottawa, Canada and The Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Germany.
“In addition to stability, versatility has also been a key factor in these purchases,” Dr. Brown says. “These centers need to perform calibrations at a wide range of energies, which our systems have always accommodated.”

Elekta Synergy is an advanced digital linear accelerator that integrates a suite of imaging tools to enable high quality, 3D imaging from the treatment control console at the time of treatment. This capability provides clinicians with a solution to the two most persistent and significant problems in radiation therapy: internal organ motion and errors in patient set-up. The result is unmatched clinical confidence to more aggressively treat tumors, while minimizing damage to surrounding healthy tissue. Elekta Synergy is in routine clinical use at hundreds of centers worldwide.

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