Researchers at Fox Chase Design Efficient Radiation-Delivery Technique for Robotic Radiosurgery

Radiosurgical procedures such as Cyberknife involve the delivery of large dosage of radiation medicine to the affected areas. This process is a long one as the medicine is delivered with the help of numerous cone-shaped beams in order to cover the tumour, which is often shaped irregularly.

Researchers at the Fox Chase Cancer Center have come up with a more effective system of drug delivery which uses a multileaf collimator (MLC) that delivers the radiation targeting the cancerous cells leaving the healthy tissue unaffected.

The research findings will be presented by Jijan Fan, a radiation oncologist at Fox Chase, at the Annual Meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology which is scheduled on 2 October 2011. The team will be presenting a comparative study of the various treatment methods with that of the Cyberknife MLC (CK-MLC). The other methods that are being practiced which the team will touch upon are IRIS cone collimator and Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy. The latter method is effective in focussing the radiation beam according to the contour of the tumour. These techniques were tested on five patients, all the cases showed good results. Amongst the methods CK-MLC was the most effective in sparing the surrounding healthy tissues, such as rectum or bladder in case of prostate cancer treatment when compared with the IRIS method. Radiation-delivery was the quickest in the CK-MLC method, which was around 10 minutes. Fan emphasised on the quick delivery time and the efficient coverage of the MLC method. Fan concluded by saying that the CK-MLC method had a greater scope for clinical application of robotics radiotherapy.