SUWON, Korea/PRNewswire-FirstCall/--Korea's leading university hospital has begun treatments using a new, faster form of radiotherapy that potentially enables doctors to improve outcomes while extending modern care to more patients. A 17-year-old female with cancer in her salivary gland was the first patient in the country to be treated using RapidArc™ technology from Varian Medical Systems.

Clinicians at Ajou University Hospital in Suwon, which treats patients from throughout Korea, carried out the pioneering treatment in less than two minutes with a single arc, or rotation, of the machine around the patient for each fraction, or treatment session. By comparison conventional IMRT (intensity modulated radiotherapy) treatment sessions would have taken 8-15 minutes, according to Dr. Mison Chun, chairperson of the hospital's department of radiation oncology.

"The treatment went extremely well and it was more comfortable for the patient because she had to lie on the couch for considerably less time," said Dr. Chun "Faster treatments mean there is less chance for the patient to move during dose delivery, so RapidArc reduces the possibility of both set-up error and errors due to internal organ motion. Since the completion of this first treatment, we have instigated a RapidArc program for head & neck, brain and prostate cancers at our hospital."
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 advanced image-guided intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) up to eight times faster than is possible with conventional IMRT. With RapidArc, Varian's Clinac® accelerator can target beams at a tumor while continuously rotating around the patient. Conventional IMRT treatments are slower and more difficult for radiotherapists because they target tumors using a complex sequence of fixed beams from multiple angles.

"RapidArc is a very effective way of delivering advanced radiotherapy treatments to many tumors more quickly while reducing the dose to surrounding healthy tissue," said Dr. Chun. "We have three linear accelerators here and we use them to treat over 100 patients each day, so the new RapidArc-equipped machine has to treat many patients efficiently while performing more advanced treatment techniques."

Ajou University Hospital's department of radiation oncology sees 3,600 cancer patients each year. Such a heavy workload results in mounting waiting lists and Dr. Chun believes RapidArc is a good way to relieve pressure on these waiting lists without compromising the quality of the treatments offered. The hospital has become the first in East Asia to offer RapidArc treatments.

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