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Specializing in Cancer Care
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Tampa Bay Oncology Center |
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CANCER is not a death sentence.
Clearwater, FL - Most people hear the word Cancer and associate it with death. Maybe even worse, fearful thoughts race through their minds of the old saying “the cure is worse than the disease”. Well, no more. Two recent advances in technology can make cancer diagnosis and treatment far more accurate and tolerable: Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy and Image Fusion.
IMRT (Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy) was conceived of in the early 1990’s. Medicare approved its use in 2000 for hospitals and 2001 for private cancer centers. IMRT uses high tech computers that perform billions of calculations a second to calculate different intensity beamlets across a field. This allows the doctors to destroy cancerous tissue while sparing adjacent healthy tissue.
The results are spectacular. IMRT is indicated for use in Breast, Prostate and most other common cancers. Because of the high accuracy, IMRT can be used when all other means fail. Historically, if a patient has had Chemotherapy and Radiation Therapy yet the cancer keeps recurring, they were sent home to die. IMRT allows us to retreat areas that were previously considered untreatable, allowing Radiation Oncologists options that just weren’t previously available. It can also be used to save salivary function and hence taste when treating head and neck cancers.
But, what good would this highly accurate technology be if we cannot see and aim at the tumors properly? Recent advances in Imaging technology allows us to combine different imaging modalities on treatment planning computers. We can take Computerized Tomography (CT formerly known as CAT scans), Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) and Positron Emission Tomography (PET), each of which has its own advantages, and merge them together. For a tumor that cannot be seen on a CT but only on an MRI, the CT and MRI images can be fused together to show the tumor on both. PET scans too can be fused with both CT and MRI. Recently PET scans have become valuable as they show tumors much earlier than other technologies.
Prostate cancer screening is extremely important. Some Medical Professionals question the PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen) test because of false positives and false negatives. However the test still catches prostate cancer at very early stages allowing many treatment options including radical prostatectomy, external beam radiation therapy and radioactive seed implants. The PSA test is even more useful in evaluating the success of the cancer treatment. Follow up visits that included continued PSA testing are essential and will determine whether or not the disease has been controlled. |
