Fujitsu : Transforming the radiation therapy experience for patients through Gamma Knife radiosurgery

- What does this technological innovation mean for patients going forward?

Mojgan: Together with my collaborators, we have been able to advance in many areas that I would consider to be ground-breaking with respect to improving patient experience. As a clinician, I can say that when patients are coming in for treatment of a brain tumour, they're incredibly nervous. To know that we can improve their experience with a state-of-the-art treatment and a faster process where they don't have to spend hours and hours at the hospital is really rewarding and lowers everyone's level of anxiety. It's really rewarding for me to know that we're able to deliver that to our patients to improve their care.

Hidetoshi: Typically, with research activities, we tend to spend much of our time focusing on the technology itself. However, from the experiences of being involved in applied research projects of this collaboration with U of T, we understood that the value and the outcome of the technology are also important. So, with this project, we've been focused on the concrete benefits for the patients. Since we didn't know how Gamma Knife treatment was actually administered, we needed to ask Professor Mojgan many questions and have discussions to make sure that the project was moving to the right direction.

- What does the future hold for your research together and the application of this technology in the medical community?

Mojgan: In the immediate and near-term future, our goal is to deploy this tool in Toronto, and then further nationally and internationally so that other clinicians can create rapid plans such as these and improve the experiences of their patients.

And then ultimately, the fundamentals of this technology are not restricted to the brain. In fact, there are many other structures in the body where treatment requires this type of planning. In this way we can potentially broaden the way in which the Digital Annealer is applied. I think it's just one step in the very broad applications that Fujitsu's technology can have for the healthcare sector, and as such, I think it can bring enormous degree of improvement in the way we treat our patients.