Lung Cancer Treatments – TomoTherapy®
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TomoTherapy® for Lung Cancer
Conventional radiation therapy can be very damaging to the lungs—it can make your breathing worse than it was before treatment by affecting nearby healthy tissues.
Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) offers TomoTherapy® Highly Integrated Adaptive Radiotherapy (HI-ART), which targets tumors in the lung with high doses of radiation and spares surrounding healthy tissues. TomoTherapy combines an advanced form of intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), with the accuracy of CT scanning technology, all in one machine.
With this advanced technology, our radiation doctors can sculpt powerful and precise radiation beams to treat hard-to-reach tumors. Using built-in CT scanning to confirm the shape and position of the tumor before each treatment, TomoTherapy reduces radiation exposure to healthy lung tissue and nearby organs like the heart.
TomoTherapy offers several advantages for the treatment of lung cancer:
- Before every treatment, advanced scanning technology provides a 3D image of the chest, so the radiation beams can be targeted according to the size, shape and location of the tumor(s) on that specific day.
- During treatment, we can adjust the intensity and direction of the radiation beams in real time. The revolutionary “slice therapy” approach treats tumors one layer at a time.
- After treatment, side effects, like difficult breathing and heart damage, are minimized because less radiation reaches healthy tissues and organs.
Many lung cancer patients who have reached their maximum tolerance dose of traditional radiation may be a candidate for TomoTherapy.
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