Press Releases
Texas Oncology–El Paso Cancer Treatment Center to Improve Patient Care with New Leading-Edge Technology
Practice Acquires Trilogy® Medical Linear Accelerator
09/29/2009
Physicians at Texas Oncology–El Paso Cancer Treatment Center announced today the installation of a new Trilogy® medical linear accelerator, for treating cancer with image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT), image-guided radiosurgery (IGRS) for brain tumors, and image-guided stereotactic radiation therapy for lung, liver, pancreatic, and spinal tumors.
Trilogy is a high-powered medical linear accelerator, a machine that rotates around the patient to deliver radiotherapy treatments from nearly any angle. It enables clinicians to concentrate radiation doses on the tumor while protecting surrounding healthy tissue. This means that it can deliver high doses of radiation quickly and with great precision, which translates into fast accurate treatments and enables greater patient comfort.
“This state-of-the-art Trilogy system enables us to treat patients with advanced radiotherapy techniques that are integrated into a highly efficient clinical process,” said Anuradha Gupta, M.D., a radiation oncologist at Texas Oncology–El Paso Cancer Treatment Center. “It provides us with tremendous versatility and precision for customizing treatments according to the specifics of each patient’s case.”
Trilogy incorporates a multi-leaf collimator for shaping the radiation beam to match the three-dimensional shape of the tumor, and a robotic On-Board Imager® device for fast, accurate, real-time tumor tracking, and automated patient positioning. Trilogy also incorporates technology that helps doctors deal with tumor motion during treatment. An infrared monitoring device can be used to turn the radiation beam on and off at a predetermined point in a patient’s breathing cycle to compensate, when needed, for motion due to respiration.
The Trilogy system can deliver conventional, 3-D conformal, and intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), as well as stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS). It uses special image-guidance technology to further enhance the accuracy of its tumor targeting.
“This important tracking technology allows us to treat lesions that might not have been treatable in the past,” said Dr. Gupta. “We can protect healthy tissues to an unprecedented degree, while delivering more powerful doses of radiation to cancerous tumors.”
“Technologies like the Trilogy machine, with the On-Board Imager and respiratory gating make it possible for us to adopt a truly personalized approach to cancer treatment,” Dr. Gupta added. “With these tools, we can make individual adjustments based on what we’re seeing at that moment. To have all of these capabilities fully integrated with the treatment machine gives us the power to truly tailor cancer treatment for each patient.”
Trilogy and On-Board Imager are registered trademarks of Varian Medical Systems, Inc.