Healthcare Perspectives Personalizing cancer care: Adaptive radiotherapy
A vast number of cancer patients will undergo radiotherapy during their treatment process. Because of this, experts are searching for ways to treat patients as effectively as they can through radiotherapy while also reducing the treatment’s side effects as much as possible. One answer to this is adaptive radiotherapy. Recent advancements in AI and imaging technology have refined the process and made new solutions possible.
These advancements have made it easier for healthcare professionals to adapt treatment to real-time images of the patient's anatomy. This helps to preserve the health of organs surrounding the targeted area and treat patients more effectively.
Today, Sasa Mutic, Senior Vice President at Varian Medical Systems, a Siemens Healthineers company, is joined by Dr. Eric Horwitz, Chair of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Temple University and Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia; Jennifer Pursley, Medical Physicist and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School; and Kirsten Offereins-van Harten, a senior radiotherapeutic technician at Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, Netherlands. They discuss how advancements in adaptive radiology technology have transformed the patient experience and the field as a whole—and where it may take us in the future.
What You’ll Learn in This Episode:
- Adaptive radiotherapy allows real time scans of a patient in order to better, more precisely treat tumors.
- Improvement of imaging technology advances the ability to contour organs, which is a major aid in avoiding collateral damage around the target.
- Adaptive radiotherapy has the potential to reduce the ill effects of typical radiological treatments by focusing on a more precise target, therefore allowing patients to maintain their quality of life.
- Adaptive radiotherapy greatly changes the way that providers work together to create a treatment path.
- Artificial intelligence can potentially expedite the process of adaptive radiotherapy by allowing for a more accurate picture of the contours around affected organs.
Connect with Sasa Mutic
Connect with Dr. Eric Horwitz
Connect with Jennifer Pursley, PhD
Connect with Kirsten Offereins-van Harten
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