Dedicated vs Multi-Purpose SRS Systems — Benchmarking Comparisons in the Literature

Ian Paddick, MSc, began his career as a Medical Physicist in 1989, working at the Hammersmith hospital, London. Since 1998 he has worked almost exclusively with the Gamma Knife, being responsible for over 5,000 patient treatments. He is considered a world authority on treatment plan metrics, having formulated the Paddick Conformity Index and the Gradient Index. In 2003, Ian formed Medical Physics Limited; a group of physicists providing expert radiosurgery physics services to SRS centres in the UK, Europe and the USA. He was the first physicist to be elected as President of the International Stereotactic Radiosurgery Society (ISRS). He currently serves as Past President. There have been an increasing number of platform comparison studies in recent years, with most comparisons limited to single-center studies. Study bias is common in the literature, due to various study flaws, including a comparison of non-contemporary equipment, unequal expertise and comparison of plans created in a clinical versus study environment. NHS England sponsored a national benchmarking program in order to evaluate current practices across clinical centers treating benign brain tumors and metastases. This NHS study, arguably the ‘study to end all studies’, provides a unique dataset of current practice across a large number of providers and equipment platforms. This will be reviewed in detail during the webinar.