IGRS Controls Spread of Metastatic Cancer

Clinicians at the Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Cancer Center use new image-guided radiosurgery (IGRS) technology to control the spread of metastatic cancer.
One of the first IGRS procedures undertaken for metastatic cancer, the technique was applied to a patient whose breast cancer spread to the brain and liver. Theodore Chung, M.D., Ph.D., a radiation oncologist and researcher for Massey and an associate professor at the VCU School of Medicine treated several of the metastatic lesions with IGRS, a procedure that enables monitoring, tracking and targeting tumors with high doses of radiation in just one to five treatment sessions.
Chung and his team of clinicians delivered the treatments on Varian’s Trilogy linear accelerator with an On-Board Imager device for localizing and targeting tumors with precisely shaped therapeutic beams. The IGRS system enabled physicians to spare significant amounts of surrounding healthy tissue.
“Our new real-time imaging and targeting capabilities are helping us turn cancer into a controllable disease,” said Chung. “These recent advances in radiosurgery are opening up an era in cancer treatment where we can actually begin to control metastatic spread.”