Radiation therapy remains the cornerstone in treating different radiation-induced diseases, including cancers, thus improving life of patients globally and increasing their survival rates.
For the past ten years, technological advancements have impacted how radiation gets delivered, reducing toxicity and resulting in higher precision.
According to experts at UEW Healthcare, these innovations lead to reduced side effects and better patient outcomes. In addition, integrating machine learning and AI in innovative therapies opens more possibilities for real-time adaptation and personalized treatment planning.
Understanding Innovative Radiation Therapy
Radiotherapy, or radiation therapy, is a form of treatment that helps to treat radiation-induced illnesses. Specialists use it to kill cancerous cells in patients’ bodies through radiation exposure. Examples of radiation that specialists use include heavy particles, high-energy electrons, gamma rays, and X-rays. It is among the most widely used treatments, with about half of patients requiring the therapy at some point.
The Goals
Most forms of radiotherapy don’t reach every part of the body. This means they can’t help treat cancer, which has spread a lot in a patient’s body.
Still, the therapy may help treat other forms of cancer either alone or along with other methods of treatment. Although it is crucial to keep in mind that every person and cancer is created differently, radiation therapy is the best treatment for various reasons.
First, it treats cancers that have recurred or returned. In this case, radiation can help to treat symptoms that the advanced cancer causes. Whether a specialist will use the therapy following recurrence depends on several factors. Other reasons include the following:
- Prevent cancer from recurring or coming back
- Shrink or cure early-stage cancers
Examples of Innovative Radiotherapies
The future’s vision is to have a world where people will live better and longer lives, free from radiation-related diseases’ side effects. Someday, we shall get there, but in the meantime, the following innovative radiotherapies are making a great impact:
1. SBRT (Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy)
This therapy combines components of 3D-CRT and IMRT, linking CT scans of tumor sites with treatment-planning programs to evaluate optimum photon radiation beam intensity and direction.
The therapy enables the delivery of radiation’s ablative dose to the target within a short treatment period. Patients with isolated metastatic/recurrent or early-stage cancer use it to the illness in the liver, lung, or other sites.
2. SFRT (Spatially Fractioned Radiation Therapy)
SFRT is innovative radiotherapy that allows specialists to deliver high but varying radiation doses across tumors while protecting every healthy surrounding organ.
Grid therapy, one of the SFRT techniques, uses physical blocks with very small homes, which allow tumors to get a combination of low and high radiation.
Another method is lattice radiotherapy, which achieves the same effects using computer models. Research shows that specialists get excellent response rates when they use the SFRT technique on large tumors.
Specialists have been using SFRT for some time. However, technological advancements now enable safer applications of such techniques.
The bottom line is that innovative radiation therapies are important for the treatment of radiation-induced diseases, such as cancer. While advances and innovations in radiation therapy technologies have considerably improved radiation therapy, adverse impacts are still common.
