Patent ID: 7368740

Claim:
A radiation beam therapy system comprising: an assembly of treatment devices, including: a charged-particle accelerator that provides a beam of energetic charged particles; a treatment station that allows positioning of a patient to receive at least a portion of the beam of charged particles; and a beam delivery system that delivers the beam of charged particles to the patient positioned at the treatment location; a database component that stores subsets of parameters associated with selected treatment devices, wherein the parameters comprise instructional information that can be used to configure the selected treatment devices for operation; an interface component that allows a user to modify the subsets of parameters associated with selected treatment devices stored in the database wherein the system is configured so that changes to the stored subsets of parameters in the database component can only be made through the interface component; and a management component that extracts subsets of parameters from the database and generates data storage elements comprising the extracted subsets of parameters in a format recognizable by the selected treatment devices, wherein the data storage elements permit configuration of the selected treatment devices based, at least in part, on the instructional information comprised therein, the management component further distributes the data storage elements to the selected treatment devices to thereby permit the selected treatment devices to operate independently of the database component.