Dr. Manishi Bansal

Radiation therapy

Radiation alone or in combination with surgery and chemotherapy plays a major role in the treatment of cancer. Radiation is one of the most sophisticated tool of modern medicine to treat cancer with a rapid advancement in technology. There has always been a quest among the scientists to invent a radiation technique where we can give high doses of radiation only to the tumor and spare the adjacent normal tissues from the side effects of radiation. This led to an innovative technique called Intensity Modulated Radiation Treatment (IMRT).

IMRT is an advanced mode of high precision radiation therapy  that utilizes computer controlled linear accelerator (LINAC) to deliver precise radiation dose to the malignant tumor or specific areas within the tumor. Treatment is carefully planned using 3-dimensinal CT images of the patient in addition with computerized dose calculations to determine the dose intensity pattern that will best conform to the tumor shape. IMRT has the potential to increase the tumor dose thus increasing local tumor control rates as well as it reduces treatment toxicities significantly by reducing dose to normal structures .

Recently, Image guided radiation therapy (IGRT) and VMAT have targeted the tumor more precisely and have become the standards of care. For intracranial neoplasms, SRT and SRS are being used to pin-point very small lesions and sparing adjacent normal brain from high dose radiation.

These newer techniques are most extensively used to treat cancer of prostate, head and neck cancer, brain, esophagus and gynaecological malignancies .