Canada's 3rd CK at Ottawa Hospital - starts treating patients in Sept

from the IV MB, by yyy60:

>>The Canadian Business Journal
July 2010

Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre - World-class cancer treatment

Once underserved, cancer patients in the Ottawa region now have considerably more access to the treatment, privacy and technology they need. This April, the Ottawa Hospital celebrated the second opening of two cancer centre expansions—the first, at the general campus, and the second, at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital (QCH).

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‘Tough to beat’

With a state-of-the-art expansion comes state-of-the-art equipment, and the Ottawa Hospital is very excited about what they now have available.

“We just got a CyberKnife,” Doering says. “It’s equipment that does radiosurgery, which allows for non-invasive treatment of tumours. It’s like a radiation treatment but it is very focused treatment. For a brain tumour, a patient would normally go in and have the have skull cut open. The recovery would be two weeks in the hospital, in the intensive care unit. With this CyberKnife, the patient comes in for three days in a row and receives a 45-minute treatment. There is no anaesthesia, no operating room and no overnight stay in the hospital. It’s painless. And it’s so precise, that it spares the healthy tissue and only focuses on the cancer.”

“The CyberKnife is also great for lung cancer, because surgeons don’t have to worry about the lungs moving as the patient breathes,” she continues. “Typical radiation is not as precise with the lung movement and it can radiate some other tissue around it. But the CyberKnife moves with the respirations, it adjusts.”

This new machine came at no small cost—it was a $3.5-million capital investment. Fortunately, the Ottawa community came together and fundraised for the CyberKnife, showing its support for sick neighbours. We have fundraised for this and I must say the community has been great.

Right now, the hospital is building the bunker for it at the general campus. “We hope to treat our first patient with the CyberKnife during the week of September 20,” says Doering. “We’re really excited about that. It treats spine, kidney, lung, brain cancers and so on. Our folks right now are getting trained on the equipment.” Speaking of which, Ottawa has the only trained neurosurgeon in Ontario for this type of equipment. “I believe when you look at the Ottawa Hospital cancer program, you will see we have the best facilities in the country, if not the world. When you factor in our equipment, facilities and specialists, we are tough to beat.”

Fight to secure CyberKnife device

from APN News & Media:

“The cancer journey is a bizarre one,” he said. Mr Mackinnon said he wanted to use the book to bring the CyberKnife device to Australia – but after years of banging his head against the Government's brick wall he was going for a more direct method.

If he could sell enough copies, he wanted to use the money raised by the book to buy a CyberKnife device and donate it to a hospital.

“As the Government refuses to act, it is left to the general public, again, to assist those in need,” he said.

CK Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy for Nonresectable Tumors of the Liver: Preliminary Results

from the IV MB, by yyy60:

>>CK Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy for Nonresectable Tumors of the Liver: Preliminary Results

HPB Surgery
Volume 2010 (2010), Article ID 309780, 8 pages
doi:10.1155/2010/309780
Clinical Study

Cyberknife Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy for Nonresectable Tumors of the Liver: Preliminary Results

K. Goyal,1 D. Einstein,2 M. Yao,2 C. Kunos,2 F. Barton,2 D. Singh,3 C. Siegel,1 J. Stulberg,1 and J. Sanabria1

(1) Departments of Surgery, University Hospitals-Case Medical Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA
(2) Departments of Radiation Oncology, University Hospitals-Case Medical Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA
(3) Departments of Medicine, University Hospitals-Case Medical Center, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106, USA

Received 24 November 2009; Revised 12 April 2010; Accepted 24 May 2010

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PURPOSE: Stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) has emerged as a treatment option for local tumor control of primary and secondary malignancies of the liver. We report on our updated experience with SBRT in patients with non-resectable tumors of the liver.

METHODS: Our first 17 consecutive patients (mean age 58.1 years) receiving SBRT for HCC (n=6), IHC (n=3), and LM (n=8) are presented. Mean radiation dose was 34Gy delivered over 1–3 fractions.

RESULTS: Treated patients had a mean decrease in maximum pretreatment tumor diameter from 6.9±4.6 cm to 5.0±2.1 cm at three months after treatment (P<.05). The mean total tumor volume reduction was 44% at six months (P<.05). 82% of all patients (14/17) achieved local control with a median follow-up of 8 months. 100% of patients with HCC (n=6) achieved local control. Patients with surgically placed fiducial markers had no complications related to marker placement.

CONCLUSION: Our preliminary results showed that SBRT is a safe and effective local treatment modality in selected patients with liver malignancies with minimal adverse events. Further studies are needed to define its role in the management of these malignancies.


** Click the link for full detail

GoGrid Continues Expansion with New East Coast Data Center

GoGrid Deploys Into Equinix to Meet Customer Demands

San Francisco, CA (Vocus/PRWEB ) June 30, 2010 -- GoGrid, a leading Cloud Infrastructure and Hybrid Hosting Provider, announced today the opening of a new GoGrid data center in Ashburn, Virginia. GoGrid has chosen Equinix, Inc (Nasdaq: EQIX), a leading provider of global data center services as its data center partner as it continues to expand operations.

"We’re pleased to announce that GoGrid cloud computing services are now available from within our Ashburn, Virginia campus," said Vince DiMemmo, general manager of Cloud and IT Services at Equinix. "Infrastructure on-demand is something our customers expect to be able to buy as they architect and deploy their Web and IT applications with us, and we’re pleased to add GoGrid as a cloud computing partner supplier."

We’re pleased to announce that GoGrid cloud computing services are now available from within our Ashburn, Virginia campus

Infrastructure on-demand is something our customers expect to be able to buy as they architect and deploy their Web and IT applications with us, and we’re pleased to add GoGrid as a cloud computing partner supplier.

The decision to expand GoGrid was a direct response to our customers and the market

We are successfully executing our expansion strategy and securing an East Coast presence is critical for us to scale and capture a significant piece of the fast growing cloud market. We are very excited to be partnering with a leader like Equinix and deployed within their customer-rich Ashburn campus to help fuel the continued growth of GoGrid.

The new GoGrid facility is a comprehensive end-to-end hosting environment solution, complete with state-of-the-art environmental controls, power and security systems, and access to more than 165 network suppliers. Multiple interconnection options enable GoGrid cloud computing services to be readily accessible by its customers.

"The decision to expand GoGrid was a direct response to our customers and the market," said GoGrid CEO & Co-Founder, John Keagy. "We are successfully executing our expansion strategy and securing an East Coast presence is critical for us to scale and capture a significant piece of the fast growing cloud market. We are very excited to be partnering with a leader like Equinix and deployed within their customer-rich Ashburn campus to help fuel the continued growth of GoGrid."

GoGrid customers who deploy GoGrid Cloud (virtual) servers in multiple data centers receive a single invoice allowing for simplified financial insight into multiple infrastructure locations. Usage by data center will appear as line-item details. Also, the GoGrid API has been updated to allow for programmatic control of objects and appliances in multiple data centers.

For more information about the new GoGrid 3.0 features and East Coast Datacenter, please visit: http://www.gogrid.com/software-update/.

Data Centers Continue to Grow in a Weak Economy

from Seeking Alpha, by David Gross:

>>Few industries have withstood the recession as well as data centers. Lease rates are still rising, capacity is being filled up, and new centers are opening every week. The industry's great recession was not in 2008 or 2009, but in 2002, when it was decimated by dot com overbuilding, and some facilities were turned back into warehouses.

This year the boom is back

from The Business Times Singapore:

>>Equinix to expand data centres in Asia

Nasdaq-listed Equinix will also use the funds - procured as loan from various banks, including DBS Bank - to expand in Hong Kong, Sydney, and Tokyo, apart from Singapore, Equinix's Hong Kong-based Asia-Pacific president, Samuel Lee, told BizIT in an interview.

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'We continued to experience strong growth within the Asia-Pacific region even during the global recession in 2009, and more so this year,' Mr Lee says. 'In fact, last year we opened a second DC in both Singapore and Sydney, and expanded our Hong Kong DC as well. This year the boom is back and we should see a strong surge in enterprise data. Much of that data would need to sit in DCs.'

In 2008, Singapore had a total of about 170,000 sq m of DC capacity, up 15 per cent over 2007. Not much capacity was added in 2009 due to the recession in 2008. But in 2010, demand may outstrip supply by up to 20 per cent, according to industry sources. Apart from Equinix, there are a slew of DC players such as SingTel, NCS, Tata Communications, ST Engineering and Fujitsu Asia.

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According to industry analysts, the demand for DC space significantly outpaces supply in the Asia-Pacific, including Japan (APJ) region, with 50 per cent of the demand being driven by government initiatives, and the rest by Internet media, telecom and IT companies.

'Demand for DC hosting currently exceeds supply,' research house Frost & Sullivan's analyst Wu Chengyu says. 'In fact, over 80 per cent of the major DCs in the Asia-Pacific are running at close to 90 per cent capacity, and space is at a premium.'

In 2009, the market for DC services in the APJ region was about US$8 billion. That's set to cross US$10.6 billion by 2011.