Newly installed technology enables clinicians to target lung and other tumors quickly and precisely using finely shaped radiation beams rather than surgery

NORMAL, Ill. /PRNewswire/ - When a diagnostic chest X-ray revealed a nodule on his left lung, Paul Hoffman, 79, had a biopsy and soon got bad news: it was Stage 1 lung cancer. He was given two options. The first was surgery, which would have been risky because Hoffman has a heart condition and a pacemaker. The second option was radiosurgery-a non-invasive treatment that uses finely shaped radiation beams to target a tumor without making a single incision.*

"I really didn't want to be operated on if I could avoid it," said Hoffman. Hoffman was referred to the Community Cancer Center in Normal, Illinois, where a new TrueBeam™ STx system from Varian Medical Systems (NYSE: VAR) had been installed just a few weeks earlier. The TrueBeam STx system targets tumors with great speed and accuracy, including tumors that move during treatment as the patient breathes. It features a multitude of technical innovations that synchronize imaging, patient positioning, motion management, and treatment delivery and can deliver a treatment more quickly than was possible with earlier generations of technology.
Patrick Fernandes, M.D., radiation oncologist, designed Hoffman's treatments to carefully target his lung tumor while minimizing exposure of nearby healthy tissues and organs, especially the spinal cord, rib cage, esophagus, and the delicate healthy lung tissues that surrounded the tumor.

"For patients with heart or lung problems, conventional surgery can be risky," said Fernandes. "Stereotactic body radiotherapy, or SBRT, can be a viable option for these patients, and often leads to good local tumor control. We use very high doses with the goal of completely destroying the tumor." *

Each of Hoffman's five treatments was completed in about ten minutes, using RapidArc radiosurgery. "RapidArc is a capability of the TrueBeam machine that enables us to modulate the dose, vary the speed of rotation around the patient, and continually shape the treatment beam in a way that dramatically shortens the duration of each treatment," Fernandes said. "Similar treatments using other technologies could have taken as long as an hour each day."

"The hardest part of the treatment was having to hold a position with my arms over my head," Hoffman said. "That's the only thing that bothered me at all. I'm 79 years old and don't move as well as I used to. Fortunately, when it was time for my treatment, the TrueBeam machine was in and ready to go. I was one of the first patients. Otherwise, I'd have been treated on another machine, and I'd have had to hold still with my arms up for 25-30 minutes at a time, which would not have been fun."

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