Infrastructure and Technology

Image Guided Radiation Therapy (IGRT)

IGRT has evolved to enable clinicians to treat the tumors that move – either with respiration or have internal motion. IGRT provides a very effective method for mitigating tumor motion. Real time image guidance and adaptive radiation therapy involves constantly imaging the motion of the tumor during treatment delivery and changing the beam delivery on the fly to compensate for unpredicted motion.

Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy(VMAT)

VMAT is a next generation arc therapy technique that establishes new standards for radiation therapy treatment speed and dose reduction to the patient. With VMAT, single or multiple radiation beams sweep in uninterrupted arc(s) around the patient, dramatically speeding treatment delivery. It reduces treatment times from the eight to twelve minutes required for “conventional” radiation therapy to as few as two minutes. This also enables physicians to visualize the tumor target at the time of treatment and to guide therapy that both maximizes the radiation dose to the target and minimizes exposure to surrounding healthy tissues – such a treatment has a higher tumor control probability and reduced side effects.

Stereotactic Radiotherapy (SRT) / Stereotactic Radio Surgery (SRS)

Stereotaxy is now a non-invasive procedure, best suited for treating intracranial tumors, vascular malformations and small extracranial lesions. Significantly high doses of radiation (ablative dose) are delivered over fewer number of fractions (3-5 sessions) with a curative intent. It has the potential for excellent tumor control and very sharp sparing of healthy critical structures.

Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy (SBRT)

SBRT is used to treat spinal, paraspinal, lung, liver tumors. It is mainly used to treat small tumors where high precision dose delivery of higher radiation dose is needed to avoid long term side effects.

Total body irradiation(TBI)

TBI is used primarily as part of the preparative regimen for haematopoietic stem cell (or bone marrow) transplantation. TBI involves irradiation of the entire body that serves to destroy or suppress the recipient′s immune system, preventing immunologic rejection of transplanted donor bone marrow or blood stem cells. Additionally, high doses of total body irradiation can eradicate residual cancer cells in the transplant recipient, increasing the likelihood that the transplant will be successful.

Respiratory Gating

Respiratory gating makes it possible to track movement of a patient’s chest as they breathe using Active Breathing Coordinator (ABC). This allows the doctor to select the optimum moment in a patient’s breathing cycle to administer the radiation.  As a result, the area around the tumor exposed to radiation can be reduced and the total dosage increased without harming surrounding healthy tissue. Respiratory gating may be helpful in treating tumors of the lung, breast, upper abdominal cancers (such as pancreatic, stomach, and liver tumors which also move as patients breathe).

Record / Verify system

The treatment plan and dose delivered to patients are stored in the integrated database. The database can be accessed and information pertaining to dose delivered can be utilized in case patient requires radiation therapy again to same site or any other site in body. (Re-irradiation)

Brachytherapy

Brachy means near, therapy means treatment. Brachytherapy is delivered by placing the radiation sources (Ir192) near the tumour. Our multichannel Microselectron HDR with TCS remote after loading system is a dedicated machine which delivers radiation in and around tumour. Brachytherapy can be given as under :

• Intracavitary for cancer cervix, cancer uterus.
• Intra luminal for cancer  Oesophagus and bronchus
• Interstitial for Breast Cancer, soft tissue sarcoma (after initial surgery), prostate, pancreatic tumour, Vagina and recurrent cervical cancer etc.
• Surface mould for superficial cancers specially skin cancer.