Mitsubishi Electric Corporation announced that it has completed the construction of a new proton therapy system for cancer treatment at its Energy Systems Center in Kobe, Hyogo Prefecture. The company has started testing of the new technology including a high dose-rate beam delivery system which reduces the irradiation time to one fourth of the current level. Mitsubishi Electric plans to perform the quality verification testing of this new system in collaboration with clinical institutions, and also utilize the preferred status granted as a member of the Kansai Innovation Comprehensive Global Strategic Special Zone in order to obtain early approval as a medical device. The new beam delivery system is intended to increase the maximum dose rate from 5Gy/min to about 15 to 20Gy/min at all depths, reducing the time to irradiate a tumor by as much as a factor of four over the current level. The shorter irradiation time provides a more comfortable setting for the patient. The new system increases the scanning speed five fold from 20mm/ms to 100mm/ms. At the same time the spot size is reduced in half from 10mm to 5mm. This means that the proton beam can be delivered more accurately more efficiently to complicated tumor volumes. The treatment system supports a new nozzle capable of both pencil beam scanning and broad beam treatment. In pencil beam scanning, a finely focused particle beam is magnetically scanned across the tumor, tracing out the three-dimensional tumor volume. In broad beam treatment, the particle beam is spread out to create a uniform field. Using collimators, the treatment field is cut out from this uniform field according to the tumor shape. The nozzle is capable of quickly switching between the two modes of treatment.

Mitsubishi Electric Corporation reported consolidated sales results for year ended March 31, 2013. For the year, the company reported sales of JPY 3,567.1 billion.

NHK and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation have jointly developed the world's first HEVC encoder for 8K ultra HDTV 'Super Hi-Vision' (SHV). SHV is the broadcasting medium of the near future. It makes viewers feel like they are really at the heart of the action, with 16 times the number of HD pixels and a 22.2 multichannel surround sound experience. HEVC is due to be recognized as an international standard in 2013. It offers about double the data compression of AVC, and about four times that of the MPEG-2 standard currently employed for digital HDTV broadcasting. The high-volume SHV images are divided into 17 horizontal rows. The parallel processing of these rows makes it possible to achieve real-time coding of SHV images. The deterioration of picture quality at the row boundaries has been lessened by having rows share data concerning the speed, direction, etc. of moving objects. NHK and Mitsubishi Electric Corporation are pursuing research and development of real-time coding of the 120 Hz frame frequency of SHV. The HEVC encoder will be displayed at the NHK Science & Technology Research Laboratories Open House 2013, which will take place from May 30th to June 2, 2013. HEVC (High-Efficiency Video Coding): MPEG-H HEVC/H.265. A video coding standard currently under joint standardization project of the ISO/IEC (International Organization for Standardization /International Electrotechnical Commission) and the ITU (International Telecommunication Union). AVC (Advanced Video Coding): MPEG-4 AVC/H.264. A video coding standard developed by the ISO/IEC and the ITU. It provides about double the video compression of the current MPEG-2 standard for digital HDTV. Features of HEVC: Video coding technology divides a frame into small blocks referred to as macroblocks. The prediction and transformation coding of the images is conducted in each block. HEVC offers variable blocks that can handle up to 64x64 pixels, changing the size according to texture, while AVC has relied on a fixed macroblock size of 16x16 pixels. It achieves both high compression and high resolution. Features of the HEVC encoder: The SHV screen is divided in 17 rows made up of 7,680 x 256 pixels. The coding in each of the rows is processed simultaneously. Data in each row is shared with the row immediately above and below, thereby lessening the deterioration in picture quality that occurs at the row boundaries.