Within a radiation oncology department, time is the one resource that cannot be replaced. Every fraction, every contour, every patient interaction is bound by the clock. But there is a thief in the simulation room that often goes unnoticed, quietly stealing minutes and sometimes hours from treatment planning. It is the contour cleanup caused by skin markers.
And while those stolen minutes might seem small, the real damage is not just to your schedule. It is to your stress levels. Every unplanned detour in the workflow forces teams to compress other tasks, work later, and carry that “we are behind” feeling through the day. Over time, that constant low-grade pressure can be just as costly as the lost productivity.
A Few Minutes Here… and Here… and Here
A patient’s CT simulation comes through, and the body contour appears to have a few jagged ridges. You know what is coming next: zoom in, delete, override density, and re-run calculations. It is a task so routine that it almost fades into the background.
But when you stop to think about it, those “just a few minutes” add up:
- 3 to 5 minutes per scan for manual contour cleanup
- Multiply by 8 to 12 sims a day
- Multiply again by 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year
That is dozens of work hours, entire work weeks, spent fixing something that could have been avoided from the start.
How RT-SPOT® Stops the Clock
RT-SPOT® Elevated Skin Markers for CT Simulation were designed to keep skin markers outside of the body contour, literally. Its elevated foam backing lifts the marker above the patient’s skin line in the CT dataset, so auto-contouring software sees skin as skin and markers as separate objects. That means no body contour distortion, no density overrides for dose perturbation, and no time lost in post-processing.
For dosimetrists, it is a cleaner dataset to plan on. For therapists, there are fewer callbacks from planning to clarify anatomy. And for patients, it is one more invisible step toward faster treatment starts.
What Could You Do With That Time?
Think about what you would do if your dosimetry team suddenly got back 1 to 2 hours every week:
- Refine complex IMRT or VMAT plans
- Perform additional peer review
- Spend more time on adaptive planning cases
- Simply get through the day with fewer overtime crunches
In a high-volume clinic, small workflow efficiencies compound into major capacity gains. We often think of workflow improvements in terms of big technology, new TPS upgrades, new imaging protocols, and new linac features. But workflow erosion can also come from the small stuff. If your skin markers are creating extra steps for every plan, that is a tax on your team’s time and energy that you pay every single day.
And it is not just about productivity; it is about people. When the pressure to “catch up” is constant, even small inefficiencies amplify stress levels. Shaving off repetitive, tedious tasks frees mental bandwidth, reduces end-of-day fatigue, and gives your team the breathing room to focus on critical clinical decisions instead of racing the clock. Over time, those small reliefs can help protect against burnout and make the workday feel more manageable.
A Simple Switch, A Permanent Change
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Replacing flat skin markers with RT-SPOT elevated skin markers for CT simulation is one of those rare upgrades that is low-cost, low-training, and high-impact: no new software, no new physics acceptance, just cleaner data from day one.
Because the best way to recover lost time is not to work faster, but to stop losing it in the first place. Removing those tiny but constant interruptions restores efficiency and lowers the daily stress load that can wear down even the strongest team.
If you are ready to evict the invisible time thief from your workflow, try RT- SPOT® in your next week of CT simulations and see how many minutes and how much calm you get back.
Megan Sargalski
Marketing Communications Specialist
