By Beena Thannickal
Last month, the University of Alabama at Birmingham treated brain cancer patients for the first time utilizing Varian HyperArc™ High-Definition Radiotherapy, making the academic medical center the first in the United States to use this technology for complex radiosurgical procedures.
With HyperArc, which Varian Medical Systems tested and partly developed in collaboration with UAB, clinicians can deliver more compact radiation doses that closely conform to the size, shape, and location of brain cancer tumors while sparing more surrounding healthy tissue.
About 20-40 percent of cancer patients will develop brain metastases. More than half of them will have more than one tumor in the brain. The risk of a metastatic brain tumor depends on the kind of cancer and how advanced it is when it is diagnosed. Typically, an increasing number of patients return for retreatment of their disease. “HyperArc allows us to plan and deliver state-of-the-art radiosurgery to highly complex cases efficiently with a very high degree of dose compactness and conformity, and has made it possible to treat patients with larger numbers of brain metastases very aggressively,” said John Fiveash, M.D., professor and vice chair for academic programs in the UAB Department of Radiation Oncology. He is also a senior scientist at the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Please visit Alabama News Center for the Full Article
