Robin Medical adapts EndoScout for lung cancer radiation therapy

Robin Medical is working with the University of Maryland School of Medicine on a noninvasive way to track lung tumor motion during radiation therapy. The approach could reduce radiation targeting errors caused by breathing and broaden use of the EndoScout system beyond MRI-guided procedures.

Why it matters: - Lung tumors move as patients breathe, which can create geometric and dosimetric errors during radiation therapy. - Those errors can expose healthy lung tissue and nearby organs to unnecessary radiation. - A simpler motion-tracking approach could make more precise lung cancer treatment easier to deploy in routine care.

What happened: - Robin Medical is collaborating with the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore on a new application of the EndoScout tracking system. - The work is being led by Dr. Amit Sawant, professor and vice chair for medical physics at UMB. - The project is funded by the National Institutes of Health under grant R01-CA262017. - The team is developing a method to track chest wall motion during free-breathing MRI scanning and use that information to estimate tumor motion during radiation therapy.

The details: - The approach combines EndoScout tracking data with MRI scans to model the relationship between chest wall motion and tumor motion. - During radiation therapy, sensors placed over the chest monitor motion and help estimate where the tumor is inside the body. - The radiation beam can then be steered to stay focused on the moving tumor. - The company says this strategy is meant to address a major challenge in lung cancer radiation therapy without requiring an integrated MRI-radiation system. - Existing integrated systems such as Elekta’s Unity platform, which includes an MRI scanner from Philips, are effective but complex and expensive. - The system was developed as a potential clinical use for EndoScout, which has already been FDA-cleared for MRI-guided interventions. - Robin Medical said the system is still under development and is not available for clinical use.

Between the lines: - The project points to a lower-complexity alternative to full MRI-guided radiation platforms. - If validated, the method could extend the value of surface tracking beyond MRI procedures and into broader radiation oncology workflows. - The publication list suggests the research has moved from concept to early validation across MRI motion modeling and surface-tracking characterization.

What's next: - The team will need additional validation before the approach can be used clinically. - Broader adoption would depend on proving that chest wall motion can reliably stand in for tumor motion across patients and breathing patterns. - Further development could open a new market for EndoScout in radiation therapy.

The bottom line: - Robin Medical and UMB are trying to make lung cancer radiation therapy more precise by using external motion tracking to estimate tumor position during breathing.