LINAC & RADIOTHERAPY
Medical sciences is touching new milestones everyday and it is quite evident from the new technologies that are available in the market today. The diagnosis and treatment of various diseases has attained a new level of accuracy and precision lke never before. With this article I would like to aquaint you about Clinical Linear Accelerator(LINAC) and Radiotherapy. Radiotherapy is one of procedures to be followed in treatment of cancer along wth surgery and chemotherapy.In most of the cases, taking care of some vital factors like age, sex, type of cancer, medicine etc. Radiotherapy can be used to treat patients fighting against it in all the three stages of cancer. In Radiotherapy patient is subjected to very high energy radiations of X-rays (also known as photons) and electrons. These radiatons have energies in the range of Megavolts (MV) for photons and Mega electron volts (Mev) in case of electrons. The machines used to produce such high energy radiatons are called as Clinical Linear Accelerator where the term clinical comes from its medical application.Other machine are also avaialble for the same type of treatment under the category of radiotherapy such as Cobalt machine which uses radioactive cobalt(C60) which emits Gamma radiation on its decay and the patient is irradiated, please keep in mind that only the affected area is irradiated not the whole body of the patient, Gammaknife- this again uses a radioactive source and find its application specifically in treatment of brain tumours and many more modalities like that but I will restrict myself to talk only about LINACs. As I have told earlier the treatment for cancer is a three pronged fork: 1) Surgery 2) Radiotherapy 3) Chemotherapy Usually a combination of one or more of these procedures are followed for the treatment of cancer patients. Lets say for a patient with breast cancer firstly surgery is done (Mastectomy-removal of breasts) in order to remove the affected area and after this patient has to undergo radiotherapy. In Chemotherapy treatment is done via medicines. The history of use of Linearaccelerators in Radiotherapy is not so old, say 15-20 years in India. The treatment done in those days is called as Conventional Radiotherapy (CRT) which were very basic and not much accurate in nature. But now a days we have got a lot of spacial techniques like IMRT, IGRT, VMAT to increase the accuracy of treatment and to reduce the amount of dosage to healthy tissue surrounding the cancerous growth. 2-Dimensional, 3-Dimansional images of patients are taken each time to reduce the scope of error and hence increasing the accuracy of the treatment. Here in India there is a long list of hospitals which provide these kind of treatments whcich includes All India Instute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Tata Memorial Hospital Mumbai, Ragiv Gandhi Cancer Hospital New Delhi, Narayana Hospital Bangalore and other private players like Apollo, Max etc. Stay tuned for more on LiNAC, different techniques of treatment and its procedures.....
Medical sciences is touching new milestones everyday and it is quite evident from the new technologies that are available in the market today. The diagnosis and treatment of various diseases has attained a new level of accuracy and precision lke never before. With this article I would like to aquaint you about Clinical Linear Accelerator(LINAC) and Radiotherapy. Radiotherapy is one of procedures to be followed in treatment of cancer along wth surgery and chemotherapy.In most of the cases, taking care of some vital factors like age, sex, type of cancer, medicine etc. Radiotherapy can be used to treat patients fighting against it in all the three stages of cancer. In Radiotherapy patient is subjected to very high energy radiations of X-rays (also known as photons) and electrons. These radiatons have energies in the range of Megavolts (MV) for photons and Mega electron volts (Mev) in case of electrons. The machines used to produce such high energy radiatons are called as Clinical Linear Accelerator where the term clinical comes from its medical application.Other machine are also avaialble for the same type of treatment under the category of radiotherapy such as Cobalt machine which uses radioactive cobalt(C60) which emits Gamma radiation on its decay and the patient is irradiated, please keep in mind that only the affected area is irradiated not the whole body of the patient, Gammaknife- this again uses a radioactive source and find its application specifically in treatment of brain tumours and many more modalities like that but I will restrict myself to talk only about LINACs. As I have told earlier the treatment for cancer is a three pronged fork: 1) Surgery 2) Radiotherapy 3) Chemotherapy Usually a combination of one or more of these procedures are followed for the treatment of cancer patients. Lets say for a patient with breast cancer firstly surgery is done (Mastectomy-removal of breasts) in order to remove the affected area and after this patient has to undergo radiotherapy. In Chemotherapy treatment is done via medicines. The history of use of Linearaccelerators in Radiotherapy is not so old, say 15-20 years in India. The treatment done in those days is called as Conventional Radiotherapy (CRT) which were very basic and not much accurate in nature. But now a days we have got a lot of spacial techniques like IMRT, IGRT, VMAT to increase the accuracy of treatment and to reduce the amount of dosage to healthy tissue surrounding the cancerous growth. 2-Dimensional, 3-Dimansional images of patients are taken each time to reduce the scope of error and hence increasing the accuracy of the treatment. Here in India there is a long list of hospitals which provide these kind of treatments whcich includes All India Instute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Tata Memorial Hospital Mumbai, Ragiv Gandhi Cancer Hospital New Delhi, Narayana Hospital Bangalore and other private players like Apollo, Max etc. Stay tuned for more on LiNAC, different techniques of treatment and its procedures.....
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