THE WORLD'S MOST ADVANCED RADIATION MEDICINE
Lexington Medical Center has added a new and very powerful weapon to its arsenal in the war against cancer. It's a high-resolution radiotherapy system called Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy (IMRT). It combines sophisticated software and hardware to more accurately target tumors, map out the degree of radiation and assign each of its 120 collimator leaves the proper position and exposure.
With this highly advanced technology, clinicians can escalate the dose of cancer-killing irradiation to tumors with minimal exposure and complications to surrounding healthy tissue.
IMRT is the most advanced radiation medicine and will have a profound impact on the way cancers are treated.
Lexington Medical Center was one of the first in the country to have this new technology.
Unlike other curative radiation treatments, the new IMRT treatment can define the exact shape of the tumor in three dimensions and vary the radiation dose across the tumor volume to meet the requirements of thickness and the rules set by the Radiation Oncologist.
Eclipse defines the anatomy and dosage goals with input from the Medical Center's CT and MRI units. The system software then analyzes those factors and helps modify or refine the plan. This procedure is called inverse planning. The computer goes through thousands of possible combinations to achieve the treatment plan which best meets the requirements set down by the Radiation Oncologist. This is significantly faster and more accurate than conventional methods of planning.
RESPIRATORY GATING
The normal act of breathing can cause targeted tumors to move slightly. In other radiotherapy systems this means that the target area has to be enlarged, possibly affecting normal organs and tissue. But that's not the case with our new Respiratory Gating system. It's designed to monitor and correct for patient motion through a video that precisely tracks the patient's chest wall position. The video data is then correlated with the motion of the tumor. As a result, the tumor, and only the tumor, is irradiated when it falls within the planned target volume. Lexington Medical Center was the first in the nation to commercially acquire this system.
The Varian 23 EX has been recently upgraded to the international
state-of-the-art in radiation treatment. This new modality is called
IGRT, image-guided radiotherapy. The upgraded linear accelerator is
capable of obtaining high-quality images - or even CT scans. This
enables the radiation team to see the tumor volume before and during
each treatment. Adjustments in the patient's position can be made to
compensate for millimeter changes in organ motion, resulting from
voluntary or involuntary causes. This greatly adds to the accuracy
of IMRT and Respiratory Gating.
A fully integrated system called VARIS Generation 6 literally handles the entire treatment process from patient registration to imaging, to treatment planning, to beam on and off. |
