What is Tomotherapy Device and Treatment?
In Tomotherapy, a high-tech product, cancerous cells are targeted with the “point shooting” technique, and unique “personalized” radiation treatments are applied for each patient.
The Tomotherapy Device was inspired by a Computed Tomography system and was designed by placing a therapeutic Linear Accelerator instead of a tomography tube. It is a system that can perform 3D high-level imaging and, simultaneously, 3D high-level beam treatments helically. It is a unique system that can perform helical rotating irradiation, cross-sectional scanning, and treatment due to its treatment structure and operation. This treatment process is likened to painting organs in 3D different colors with a skinny pencil in many respects. In this way, it provides successful treatment of oncology patients with the help of photon x-rays by protecting critical and healthy organs in tomotherapy treatment with TomoTherapy devices.
This imaging technology increases the accuracy and reliability of the tumor’s x, y, and z coordinates. This way, the safety margins in radiotherapy treatments can be effectively controlled, and the safety margins of healthy tissues other than tumors are reduced. Thus, with the preservation of more healthy tissue, it provides significant clinical advantages in many treatments. More protection of healthy tissues: It plays a vital role in reducing the direct side effects, increasing the standard of living, increasing long-term survival, and minimizing the risk of cancer recurrence. The high-end technologies used by the TomoTherapy device must be used, especially in intensity-modulated radiotherapy, radiosurgery, and hypofractionation treatments.
Effect of Speed on Treatment
With the development of TomoTherapy treatment systems in recent years, very fast, accurate, and routine patient contouring and planning operations can be performed. Rigid and deformable fusion in contouring systems are examples of this situation. On the planning side, high-accuracy plans that are made in a short time and appeal to an overall patient portfolio make some non-routine applications in radiotherapy routine easy to apply and successful. Since patient plans are routinely finalized in a much shorter time with TomoTherapy, patients can be treated as soon as possible. Since the device does not use a straightening filter in every patient, the treatments are completed in shorter times by increasing the dose rates. This way, the time for patients to enter therapy can be reduced, and patient comfort will be improved thanks to the rapid end of treatment.
Effect of Imaging on Radiation Therapy
TomoTherapy treatment systems differ from other radiation oncology devices and obtain therapeutic images. Conventional radiotherapy devices, which are still used today, take pictures using the Flat Panel Detector, which can get 2D or reconstruction images in Radiology. On the other hand, the system used in the TomoTherapy concept obtains 3D Images with the Computed Tomography detector used in Computed Tomography in Radiology. Due to the sensor used and the fact that the irradiation plane and the imaging plane are the same, images with almost 100% accuracy are obtained, and error margins are reduced by treatment on the same axis. Thanks to the accurate Computed Tomography detector in TomoTherapy devices, adaptive radiotherapy can be applied online through images taken daily. The shrinkage or displacement of the tumor during the total treatment period is monitored in each session, and the department can quickly adapt the patient plan according to the current situation, and personalized treatments can be provided daily.
Patient Friendly Tomotherapy
Devices working with the tomotherapy treatment concept have a standard operating principle to perform all kinds of treatment. The most important reason for this standardization was invented and developed by a Medical Physicist and was designed considering the daily workflow of physicians, medical physicists, and technicians. In this way, since it offers less workload compared to a radiotherapy treatment device in its daily working principle, it minimizes doctors’ time to draw patient contours and considerably reduces the burden of other business lines. Thanks to the benefit of the workflow according to the patient density, an increase is observed in the time each staff allocates for a patient.
Technological Advances in Tomotherapy
With the TomoDirect feature, the device can perform a particular irradiation optimization at fixed angles. Thanks to this feature, critical organ protection can be provided at the highest level in some specific breast, prostate, head and neck, and lung treatments.
With the TomoEdge feature, the jaw widths can be changed dynamically during the treatment, and sharp dose distributions are obtained by preserving the healthy tissues more. With this feature, treatment times can be shortened by 50%.
Unlike all other radiotherapy devices, the TomoTherapy device can highlight the differences between the planned and actual treatments by collecting the given radiotherapy information one by one during the treatment. In this way, it graphically reveals whether the “Personalized” treatments given to the patients are correct for each session and physically presents the rays given to the patient for each section to the department in the computer environment.