INNN Mexico

The National Institute of Neurology and Neurosurgery of Mexico (INNN) was founded in 1947 in Mexico City. The INNN is a center dedicated to clinical assistance, research and education in neurology and neurosurgery.  In 2002, INNN installed and inaugurated a Novalis (BrainLAB, Germany) radiosurgery system focused to treat only central nervous system deceases: malign and benign tumors, vascular malformations, pain and functional disorders. The Novalis linear accelerator was unique at its time offering high precision radiosurgery treatments and advanced techniques such as IMRT. In fact, INNN was the first Mexican hospital to offer IMRT treatments in 2002. Since then, INNN is a national reference site for small beam dosimetry and QA for IMRT. Nowadays, the Novalis linac left for a high end TrueBeam STx^® (Varian Medical Systems, USA) linac dedicated to neurological radiosurgery with the addition of spine radiosurgery. The INNN offer frameless radiosurgery, circular cone radiosurgery and SBAR/SBRT treatments with VMAT.

The medical physics group at INNN is formed by 6 members with Ph.D. and/or M.Sc. grade in medical physics. The group has a lot of experience working (more than 15 years) with PTW dosimetry equipment. The INNN has full 3-D water scanning systems (MP3-M and MP3-XS), conventional ionization chambers (PTW-30013, and 31010), mini-ionization chambers (PTW-31006, 31014 and 31016) and solid-state detectors (PTW-60018 and 60019). Reference electrometers, such as UNIDOS, UNIDOS E and UNIDOS^webline are used for absolute and relative dosimetry. Also, a T-Ref chamber is used for small beam dosimetry. For QA, there is available an OCTAVIUS 1500^® array and phantom with VeriSoft. In-vivo dosimetry is carried out with PTW diodes and associated software and electrometers. A PTW-DIAMOND MU verification software complements the VMAT QA equipment. QUICKCHECK and NOMEX are used for routine QA of linac and OBI systems.

INNN has a lot of experience supporting the formation of human resources highly specialized in medical physics with emphasis in small beam dosimetry and QA for VMAT and IMRT. Several master/doctoral students performed their project thesis at INNN. The expertise of INNN medical physics group might be consulted in scientific journals such as Medical Physics, Physics in Medicine and Biology, Physica Medica and others.