Prostate cancer patient Clark Hayward shares his personal story.
Varian IGRT: A Dynamic Technology On The Move
Advances in image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) enable clinicians to track and target tumors precisely at the moment of treatment—sparing more healthy tissues and minimizing side effects.
When Clark Hayward's primary healthcare physician noticed a nodule on the left side of Hayward's prostate during a routine physical, he didn't think it was anything to worry about. Hayward is a 53-year-old active father of three and had no other symptoms. However, just to be on the safe side, he referred Hayward to a urologist, who took a biopsy. The results came as a big shock—multiple tumors and a high likelihood that the cancer had extended beyond the prostate.
As a part-time paramedic, Hayward knows a lot about emergency medicine, but up until then he had heard only a little about prostate cancer. Determined to confront his life-threatening diagnosis head-on, he started out on a research quest that led him to other prostate cancer patients, bookstores, Web sites of all the major cancer institutes, and to Arun Puranik, MD, director of the Image-Guided Radiotherapy Treatment Program for Community Care Physicians in Latham, New York.
"Based on my own personal goals and lifestyle, surgery was not a good option," says Hayward, who is director of client development for a major telecommunications company and enjoys many outdoor hobbies, including trail running, mountain biking, skiing, and kayaking. "So I sought out a couple of opinions on treatment options and liked Dr. Puranik's plan the best. It was the follow-up radiation treatment that made the decision for me—Dr. Puranik's ability to visualize the tumor, reduce the margins around the tumor, and preserve as much healthy tissue as possible."
Dr. Puranik prescribed brachytherapy—radiation seed implantation—followed by image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) using implanted gold markers and the Varian On-Board Imager® device to help ensure accurate beam placement. "Every cancer patient is unique," Dr. Puranik explains. "In my experience, Varian has a highly reliable radiation therapy system and with the On-Board Imager we can accurately match the radiation beam with the position of the tumor at the moment of treatment. This helps ensure we deliver the maximum radiation dose to the tumor, while sparing normal tissues."
Accurate beam placement with advanced imaging techniques is setting the stage for a new standard of care in hospitals and clinics around the world. By the end of fiscal 2005, Varian had received more than 275 orders for On-Board Imager devices for either Clinac® or Trilogy™ accelerators. While the bulk of these orders are from North America, hospitals and clinics around the globe are expressing interest in this innovative imaging technology.
"IGRT is at the forefront of another technological revolution in cancer treatment," says Todd Pawlicki, PhD, assistant professor in the department of radiation oncology at the Stanford University School of Medicine in Palo Alto, California. "In the past, we were treating larger areas of the body to accommodate tumor motion and daily setup errors. Now we have more control because we can more accurately image the tumor at any time during treatment, which allows us to precisely target the radiation therapy. For patients, this means sparing more normal tissue so we can deliver a higher radiation dose to the tumor while improving the patient's quality of life."
The Stanford clinic treats about 1,000 new patients each year, using the Varian Trilogy accelerator primarily for head, neck, and pancreatic cancers, as well as for innovative research into ways to conquer cancer. The majority of Stanford patients receive radiation therapy in conjunction with surgery and chemotherapy. "By imaging and targeting the tumor more accurately, we can reduce the toxicity of radiation therapy," says Quynh-Thu Le, MD, associate professor in the radiation therapy department at Stanford.
The increased accuracy of radiation beam placement is one of the main reasons the Buddhist Tzu Chi General Hospital in Taipei, Taiwan, one of Asia's leading cancer treatment centers, recently purchased a Varian IGRT system. The Tzu Chi hospital provides treatment for a wide range of diseases, including lung, esophageal, head, and neck cancers, offering advanced treatments to help patients recover from their ailments as quickly as possible.
