Behind the Scenes: Radiation Therapy: Creating a customized radiation treatment plan
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At The Harold Leever Regional Cancer Center, the radiation team is dedicated to providing the safest and most advanced radiation therapy to every patient. A significant part of that is developing a customized treatment plan.
The development of the treatment plan begins with a CT simulation, which allows the doctor to see the patient’s internal anatomy and delineate the areas to target and avoid. The treatment plan is created based on this information and involves three key elements: the dosimetrist, the physicist, and the treatment planning system.
A treatment planning system is a computer software program used to determine optimal beam arrangements, energies, field sizes, and other elements to ensure that the radiation dose patients receive is as safe and effective as possible.
The Leever Cancer Center already uses a sophisticated treatment planning system, but that system is about to get significantly better. The Leever team is in the last phases of testing an updated treatment planning system (RayStation) that will deliver unprecedented speed and accuracy, giving patients the best, safest, and most precise radiation treatment.
The role of the dosimetrist is to ensure that the radiation treatment delivers the strongest radiation dose while minimizing any negative effects on the patient’s healthy organs.
“From the patient’s perspective, the whole point is to deliver the prescribed amount of radiation to the tumor while minimizing exposure to healthy tissue,” said Lily Tang, a Leever physicist. “That requires effective and accurate algorithms. The new algorithms can really minimize radiation delivery to healthy tissue, so patients can feel comfortable knowing that our system will deliver the correct dose to the tumor while sparing healthy tissue to the maximum extent.”
Patients can feel comfortable knowing that our system will deliver the correct dose to the tumor while sparing healthy tissue to the maximum extent.— Lily Tang, HLRCC Physicist
The third part of the puzzle, the physicists, “do a little bit of everything,” said Crooks. “Sometimes we do treatment planning, but we also check the plans done by the dosimetrist to ensure all the data has been imported correctly. We calibrate the machines and do quality assurance on them to ensure they are delivering the dose we think they are delivering. It’s a much more complex delivery that can’t be easily computed, so we actually do measurements with the delivery beam to make sure it’s being delivered properly.”
Working together, the dosimetrists and physicists ensure that the treatment prescribed by the physician is delivered as accurately and safely as possible. “All of the techniques are very advanced,” said Tang. “We are just improving on an already very good technique, which will have better long-term effects for patients and hopefully fewer side effects.”