Excellent Radiation Therapy Techniques
"Radiation Therapy is a single machine under one roof to cater to our entire Radiation Oncology department in our hospital. In short, if one needs any sort of technique of radiotherapy in the entire world to treat any patient for any condition, we at BGS Gleneagles Hospital are equipped with it.
With one single machine called the TrueBeam STx for external radiation and a 24 channel BAT therapy machine for internal radiation. A machine with such accuracy and precision of delivering that patient is not very simple. It starts with a journey that starts with an MRI. One can see the nerve only with an MRI, but the computer only understands a CT for calculation. To fuse is not an easy task. If one is drawing on an MRI and then the fusion doesn't happen, it is going to deliver somewhere else. If it is a 1 millimetre MRI and it is exactly fusing with the CT, then it means that we have gone through the exact precise planning with a very experienced Radiation Physicist.
Whatever is seen on the computer screen has to be delivered to the patient exactly. In 45 minutes, the machine goes around the patient and does another CT Scan to exactly localize whether the patient is not even a millimeter away from where we are giving the radiation. Though the treatment takes another half an hour to give that high dose, the patient cannot afford to move nor can we allow them to move. We follow an advanced way of masking without having to poke into the patient. We have a very good mask that protects the patient and the machine keeps working on the imaging with great precision and with sub millimeter accuracy.
We have successfully delivered a number of patients with this technique. We in order to make the process faster have now started using something called RapidArc technique, a brain-led software and precision CBCT on the couch. This is just like any other treatment. We focus on the patient from different places and everything goes down into 1 point inside the ball. Imagine our head like a ball and we give the treatment from different directions. With this the entire brain receives one thousandths or one ten thousandths of the dose, but 100% into the tumour. This way the brain doesn't get affected at all and at the same time, the tumour is completely killed. RapidArc has changed a lot of this scenario, though it was used mostly for head and neck and brain cancers. We have been using this for stereotactic radio surgery concepts also. "
