Dr. Joshi,

Today I received my copy of the SPOHNC (Support for People with Oral and Head and Neck Cancer) newsletter. The featured article was about Rapid Arc Radiation Therapy. Am sure that you're familiar with it, but as the rest of us most likely aren't, I looked for the article online but didn't find it on their website.

I found info from other sources:

Rapid Arc with IGRT

Varian Medical Systems (the manufacturer)

The newsletter article states that what is now a procedure that can last from five to fifteen minutes of actual radiation time, this method takes only seventy-five seconds plus setup time. Wow!

Can you 'dumb down' this article a little so that I can understand it better? What do you think about this? How cost prohibitive do you suppose it will be? Cost-wise the IMRT machines, programming and engineering are pricey - I can't imagine what this will be.

Thank you,

Mimi

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Mimi McC,

Hi Mimi

See this previous post (Nov. 2006) on HI-ART TomoTherapy.

These machines are coming as funding allows.

Best wishes
Vinod

Both of these treatments (Rapid Arc and Tomo) use a similar principle - that of a moving beam of radiation which completes a circuit around the patient altering its' strength as it goes. The effect of this is much like IMRT in that it can give a highly shaped area of radiation and hopefully reduce the dose to normal tissues whilst maximising dose to cancer.
The difference between the two techniques is that Tomo needs a dedicated machine (looking a lot like an ordinary CT scanner) whilst Rapid Arc is a software application 'bolted on' to a a modern Linear accelerator-LinAc (the standard radiotherapy treatment machine).
There are Tomo machines going in all over the UK as they are flexible enough to have a wide range of applications. Rapid Arc is , in theory, cheaper but the treatments are complex and as such might take a busy LinAc out of action for several hours to treat one patient which is something many UK departments could not 'afford' in the sense of efficiency and capacity.

Doc,

Thanks for the info! You dumbed it down enough for me to get it and I appreciate that. Looks as if there are some innovative times ahead for oral cancer patients well as for the other cancer patients out there. Being the not-so-proud owner of two of them (breast and oral), I try to stay on top of new findings.

Thanks again,

Mimi