Radiation Therapy for Pancreatic Cancer

Dr. Oneita Taylor: We have advanced technology at CTCA where non-resectable pancreatic cancers are treated with chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Radiation therapy treatment entails the use of TomoTherapy® image-guided radiation. With TomoTherapy image-guided radiation, we obtain a CT scan of the patient immediately before each radiation treatment to ensure that we're targeting the radiation treatment correctly on the pancreatic cancer and avoiding excessive radiation to normal structures. Normal structures associated with the pancreas include the liver, kidneys and small intestines. Those structures do not tolerate really high doses of radiation, but we can deliver a high dose of radiation to the pancreas and shrink the cancer in the pancreas, avoiding excessive radiation to normal structures utilizing the TomoTherapy image-guided radiation.

The TomoTherapy radiation is able to sculpt the radiotherapy beam around the pancreas and it shapes the radiation therapy beam to the shape of the cancer in the pancreas. Such as if you have a concave mass in the pancreas, we're able to target the radiation beam in that manner and, hopefully, control the cancer in the pancreas with the targeted beam directed in the shape of the cancerous mass itself.