OREANDA-NEWS. Varian Medical Systems (NYSE: VAR) today announced the creation of an interactive online group in which clinicians can share RapidPlan™ models for treating cancer patients using radiotherapy or radiosurgery. Hosted on the OncoPeer™ Cloud Community, the RapidPlan Model Sharing group www.oncopeer.com is open to Varian customers, and allows clinicians to share RapidPlan models that can improve the efficiency and quality of treatment models and cancer care across multiple institutions.

The first RapidPlan model shared on OncoPeer is a stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) treatment of lung cancer that comes from the Beatson West of Scotland Cancer Centre in Glasgow, U.K. RapidPlan knowledge-based planning provides clinicians with models that have been shown to enhance the quality and speed of developing treatment plans for many types of external beam radiotherapy and allows clinicians to build and improve models.  

"RapidPlan has positively increased the efficiency and quality of our treatment plan development," said Garry Currie, head of Radiotherapy Physics at the center in Glasgow. "By sharing our RapidPlan models on OncoPeer, we have the opportunity to share our knowledge and contribute to the collective understanding of high-quality treatment plan development around the world.  Also, we create the opportunity to learn from others in the community so that we can continue to increase the quality of our plans here in Scotland."

Launched in 2015, OncoPeer enables users to initiate threaded discussions, form open or closed groups, share and comment about uploaded files, create events, monitor trending keywords within the community and sort information by keyword. 

"We are very pleased with the growth of OncoPeer over the past year and the creation of new knowledge sharing groups like this one for RapidPlan, are testament to the desire of clinicians around the world to learn from each other in this fight against cancer," said Sukhveer Singh, vice president Oncology Continuum Solutions at Varian. "We will continue to expand this important knowledge sharing resource."