Patent ID: 7398309

Claim:
A communications system for managing communications in a proton beam therapy device, the system comprising: a treatment station having a plurality of hardware subsystems used to direct a calibrated and aligned beam towards a patient isocenter; one or more host applications used to monitor and control the operation of the treatment station; one or more functional components comprising the hardware subsystems associated with the operation of the treatment station wherein the functional component includes one or more proctors that monitors the hardware subsystems wherein the proctor monitors the hardware subsystem independent of the operation of the one or more host applications and implements corrective action without the host applications being active; an agent connected to each host application using a single client data channel per host application, the agent further connected to each functional component by a monitor data channel wherein the agent performs routing operations between each host application and the functional components such that each host application can communicate with each functional component using the single client data channel thereby reducing the number of total channels required in the communications system and improving scalability.