Digital Integrated Brachytherapy Unit (IBU-D): The Only One of its Kind in North America
By Mahta Mirzaei McKee, MS, DABR
The Comprehensive Cancer Center at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center recently installed a new Digital Integrated Brachytherapy Unit, IBU-D. The only one of its kind in the United States and North America, the IBU-D offers a range of benefits from increased precision to shorter treatment times.
Since 2005, Wake Forest Baptist has been one of the few medical centers in the country to offer integrated brachytherapy. Brachytherapy involves placing a source close to the tumor in order to directly deliver high doses of radiation. The new digital unit takes the technology to the next level.
"This new unit is exciting because it offers us the ability to do an implant, plan it and treat the tumor without having to change the patient position," said Kathryn Greven, M.D., professor of radiation oncology at Wake Forest Baptist. “This will ensure accuracy so that we can achieve better tumor coverage while avoiding normal tissues.”
Brachytherapy is used for cancers of the uterus, cervix, vagina, lung, prostate, breast and other sites.
The IBU combines all aspects of brachytherapy treatment. Patient preparation, applicator insertion, imaging, treatment planning, delivery and verification now are all possible in a single shielded room -- offering significant time savings and improving implant quality. The integrated IBU-D procedure ensures a stable, conformal geometry for the complete process and more accurate control throughout, and shortens the overall treatment time for each patient.
The heart of the IBU-D is an amorphous flat panel detector that provides clinicians with high-resolution, distortion-free digital images that are almost film-like quality. The imaging workstation provides instant access to key information on a single screen.
For patients like Sandra Teague, having access to the latest therapies delivers powerful peace of mind. Diagnosed with cervical cancer last year, she was immediately referred to the Comprehensive Cancer Center where she underwent brachytherapy, chemotherapy and external radiation. A year later, she is cancer-free. “The doctors and staff at the Cancer Center are the absolute best and I couldn’t have wished for a better outcome,” said Teague.
As for next-generation applications of IBU-D, Wake Forest University Health Sciences is working with manufacturer Nucletron to develop an implementation of digital tomosynthesis that can be used with the digital IBU system to produce volumetric information for brachytherapy treatment planning.
To refer a patient or for information, please call PAL.
Benefits of Digital Integrated Brachytherapy:
· Fluoroscopy from all directions.
· Improved planning accuracy.
· Reduced risk of applicator displacement.
· Verification of source position at any time.
· More comfort for patient.
· Intraoperative brachytherapy.
· Time saving.
· Improved implant quality