Over the years there is significant rise in cancer cases and scientific community is working with several approaches to overcome this disease. There are couple of treatment approaches, radiotherapy is one of viable treatment option and in certain situations it is the only treatment option. Scientifically it is a complex process and is continuously evolving with efforts of research community. In recent clinical work and follow up on AAPM and ASTRO publications, we noticed that a specific group of researchers is using innovative techniques and followed their efforts in cancer cure.
UW Madison Department of Human Oncology (HUMONC) is one of original 03 sites for ViewRay (VR) system. VR is a novel radiotherapy treatment modality and is first modality with onboard MR imaging. Since it is an MR system, patients don’t receive additional imaging related radiation exposure which is a critical concern in CT imaging.
VR physics team at HUMONC, recently commissioned and upgraded theirVR Cobalt system to MRIdianLinac. Since it was first upgrade of its kind in world there were commissioning, research, validation, calibration, process flow, hardware, technology and regulation related challenges. The physics team successfully completed this upgrade and are treating patients on this new system and this complex process took more than 06 months from inception to completion. The upgraded MRIdian system has opened avenues of increasing not only the number of clinical treatment sites for VR but also helps in improving overall success of radiotherapy process in general.
In some of the radiotherapy treatments like SBRT (Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy) a specific tumor target is given high radiation dose but precise imaging is very important in such complex treatments. VR based SBRT procedures are under investigation at HUMONC. The VR physics team at HUMONC is exploring feasibility of such cases especially for spine SBRT and abdominal sites like pancreatic cancer and liver tumor. Also, respiratory motion is big challenge in radiotherapy especially when tumor is in proximity of critical organs like lung, heart, spine and others. Dr Yadav who is lead physicist on this system at UW is exploring an innovative approach for tracking respiratory motion management in real time so that only tumor receives the prescribed radiation dose and her team recently published several research manuscripts on their unique and novel work on various aspects of MR guided radiotherapy.
We came to know that she is also working with radiology scientists and other interdisciplinary researchers to explore the possibility of totally removing CT related radiation dose to the patients undergoing radiotherapy. With their ongoing efforts in addressing such critical challenges the team has been awarded a competitive NIH-NIBIB (National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering) grant. This is transforming the discipline of radiotherapy and is an exciting time to be working on such aspects of the discipline.