A hospital that is using RapidArc radiotherapy to treat cancers of the head & neck and cervix is announcing it will be expanding its use for treatment of other cancers. Yashoda Cancer Institute in Hyderabad has found it can deliver image-guided, intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) faster and more precisely using the RapidArc technology from Varian Medical Systems (NYSE: VAR).
"We were very excited to become the first hospital in India to introduce RapidArc treatments earlier this year and the results so far give us great satisfaction," says Dheeraj Gorukanti, chief executive officer of Yashoda Hospitals Group. "We believe it has the potential to be better than conventional IMRT treatments for many cases of cancer and going forward our clinical team intends to use RapidArc on a majority of patients."
"RapidArc provides highly conformal dose distributions which can be delivered very quickly," said Dr. G Surender Rao, executive director at Yashoda Cancer Institute, which has now delivered more than 100 treatments with the new technology. "The majority of patients we have treated with RapidArc to date have been head & neck and cervical cancer patients. Cervical cancer is the number one indication for women in India but treating it with standard radiotherapy or brachytherapy is sometimes time-consuming. RapidArc gives highly conformal dose distributions which can be delivered in a very short space of time, enhancing patient comfort and offering a high quality treatment."
RapidArc delivers a precise and efficient treatment in single or multiple arcs of the treatment machine around the patient and makes it possible to deliver image-guided intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) two to eight times faster than is possible with conventional IMRT. Faster treatments allow for greater precision, since there is less chance of patient or tumor movement during treatment delivery and, with less time on the treatment couch, also allow for greater patient comfort. Conventional IMRT treatments are slower and more difficult for radiotherapy radiographers because they target tumors using a complex sequence of fixed beams from multiple angles.