Radiotherapy

Non-invasive medical technologies

Advanced treatment centres

Private medical centres

Radiotherapy

There have been many advances on conventional radiotherapy in recent years, particularly in the introduction of image guided treatments, and there are many competing proprietary technologies. We list here a few of these that are in use at the advanced treatment centres today.

Trilogy® radiotherapy

With the Trilogy® radiotherapy system, the width of the radiation beam can be adapted to the volume of the tumour and it also has 'stereotactic' abilities in some body areas. This enables it to fix the location of the tumour before and during each treatment session.

The tumour can therefore be targeted more accurately than with conventional radiotherapy. Not only does this reduce damage to surrounding healthy tissue, but it enables greater power to be used, which shortens each treatment session.

Trilogy stereotactic radiotherapy

TomoTherapy® Hi-Art® system

The ring gantry-based TomoTherapy® platform combines integrated CT imaging with conformal radiation therapy to deliver sophisticated radiation treatments with speed and precision while reducing radiation exposure to surrounding healthy tissue.

The Hi·Art® treatment system delivers helical (continuous 360º) IMRT (image guided radiotherapy that uses tens of thousands of narrow beamlets, all targeting the tumour and individually optimised to contribute to the total required dose.

TomoTherapy HiArt system

Radiotherapy is now a very common form of treatment for many forms of cancer, either alone or in conjunction with surgery or other treatments, but there is a wide variety of types of radiotherapy available.

External radiotherapy is usually applied over several weeks, but still some patients prefer to travel for treatment. There are two main reasons for this.

External radiotherapy

■	Advanced radiotherapy systems target tumours more accurately, reducing the impact on the surrounding tissue.
■	In many countries patients report long delays for radiotherapy, and this can even apply for private patients. No-one likes to have to wait when they have cancer, but centres like Klinik Hirslanden in Zurich, Switzerland offer radiotherapy almost immediately. In practice this means that radiotherapy can start as soon as you can arrange to be there.

These are two example of new generation radiotherapy devices, found in advanced treatment centres today, but there are others.

Intraoperative radiotherapy (IORT)

Originally developed with brain tumours in mind, this is now more commonly used for breast cancer. Treatment is given in a single dose during open surgery, directly to the tumour bed, rather than through the skin and intervening tissue some time after the operation.

Intrabeam®

This not only saves radiation burn and damage to healthy tissue but can also cut weeks from conventional external radiotherapy.

Visit the Breast Cancer page for more details. We understand that some centres are now using this technology for other treatments and more is likely in the future.

Specialist treatments < Radiotherapy

Advanced Radiotherapy Centres

Radiosurgery

This is very different to radiotherapy. Radiosurgery uses radiation beams of much higher power and greater precision than radiotherapy, with the result that treatments can be reduced to as little as a single session of 45-90 minutes.

CyberKnife®

The leading system of radiosurgery is CyberKnife® and we have a separate web site dedicated to this and providing an on-line enquiry form for a choice of centres. CyberKnife is not suitable for all tumours but it can be the only form of treatment available for complex tumours in sensitive locations and it may offer an alternative to open surgery.

Visit the CyberKnife page for more details

Even with advanced tumours or the recurrence of a tumour following radiotherapy, brachytherapy offers patients considerable advantages. It may be used alone or in conjunction with traditional radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy.

Brachytherapy therefore allows a higher radiation dose to be administered in the shortest possible time. The total duration of treatment is, in general, reduced from six weeks to one week. A further advantage is the significantly lower radiation exposure of patients compared to traditional radiotherapy.

Here the radiation source is placed in direct contact with the tumour. The advantage is that the radiation takes effect directly in the malignant tissue. This means that the fall-off of in the radiation dose in the surrounding tissue is much higher than with external radiotherapy.

Brachytherapy

Visit the Cancer Treatment Centres page, which also covers centres offering surgical and medical oncology options.

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