Cancer Technology Aids Quality Of Life

Illawarra Mercury

Wednesday May 9, 2007

By COURTNEY TRENWITH

REVOLUTIONARY technology at Wollongong Hospital is helping neck and head cancer survivors enjoy a greater quality of life after treatment.

A new planning technique for radiation therapy allows doctors to more accurately focus radiation on the cancerous tumour while limiting radiation to other areas.

Increased accuracy means doctors are able to avoid affecting other tissues such as the spinal cord and saliva glands.

"That's very important for keeping comfort of the mouth and integrity of the teeth," Dr Chris Fox, director of radiation oncology at Wollongong Hospital, said.

"The thing that patients complain about the most when treating head and neck tumours is dryness of the mouth.

"With this technology we can generally spare one of the major salivary glands and that's been shown to be able to ease the feelings of dryness in the longer-term and hopefully maintain the health of the patient."

Tumours in hard to reach places in the head and neck now also have a much greater chance of being effectively treated.

The technology, called intensity modulated radiation therapy, does not improve the efficiency of the radiation itself but limits the side effects.

"Because radiation affects all tissues we want to be able to minimise the radiation to the tissue that we don't need to treat and maximise the dose to the tumorous areas," Dr Fox said.

"It's very hard to get across to a lay person how exciting it is."

Dr Fox said the software had been developed for more than a decade but no-one had the machinery and clinical training to be able to use it.

Only four hospitals in NSW use this new technology.

Dr Fox said the technology could only be used on tumours in the head and neck because organs in other areas of the body moved and the intensity modulated radiation therapy required precision to the closest millimetre.

However, there was potential for it to be used for prostate cancer.

Last year, about 40 - or 5 per cent - of radiation therapy patients at Wollongong Hospital were treated using the new planning technique.

CT scans are taken of the affected area and used to create a virtual patient using the innovative software, which allows a radiation oncologist to identify the areas that need to be treated and the intensity of the dose of radiation.

Radiation therapists then prepare a treatment plan according to the limitations of the radiation technology. They are able to modify the strength of the radiation beam in a much more sophisticated way.

"(The technology) greatly increases our chances of modifying the radiation beams and when we put the whole plan together we can create a very complex distribution of radiation in the body, far more complex than we could do with standard technologies," Dr Fox said.

The radiation is then delivered to a "phantom" - a piece of material with radiation detectors - to double check that what treatment has been planned on the computer will actually work in real life, before it is applied to the patient. The delivery of the radiation is unchanged.

© 2007 Illawarra Mercury

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