{"id":83242,"date":"2024-07-22T13:36:13","date_gmt":"2024-07-22T17:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/?p=83242"},"modified":"2024-08-06T11:15:33","modified_gmt":"2024-08-06T15:15:33","slug":"new-radiation-machine-targets-cancer-with-pinpoint-accuracy-even-as-the-tumour-moves-during-treatment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/healthy-tomorrows\/new-radiation-machine-targets-cancer-with-pinpoint-accuracy-even-as-the-tumour-moves-during-treatment\/","title":{"rendered":"New radiation machine targets cancer with pinpoint accuracy \u2014 even as the tumour moves during treatment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Dr. Miller MacPherson accepts delivery of the MR-Linac radiation therapy system.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

A new radiation therapy system will empower The Ottawa Hospital\u2019s radiation oncology team to target cancer with unprecedented accuracy \u2014 even as the tumour moves inside the patient\u2019s body during their treatment session.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On July 13, our Cancer Centre accepted delivery of the MR-Linac, the world\u2019s first machine to combine diagnostic-quality magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) with a radiation machine called a linear accelerator (linac). The MRI finds the tumour, and the linear accelerator fires a radiation beam to shrink it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt\u2019s really an engineering marvel to bring these two technologies together,\u201d says Dr. Miller MacPherson, Head of Medical Physics at The Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hitting a moving target<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Radiation therapy is a powerful way to treat a variety of cancers \u2014 including prostate, lung and breast cancer \u2014 but it can also damage healthy tissue. That\u2019s why medical radiation technologists must be careful to only treat the tumour and not the surrounding area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The problem is that tumours tend not to stay in one place. Even the simple act of breathing in and out is a big driver of internal movement and can cause a tumour to shift within a patient\u2019s body in the middle of a treatment session.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the MR-Linac automatically tracks the tumour in real time while the radiation beam is on, preventing harm to healthy tissue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWe can deliver a radiation treatment that\u2019s exactly personalized for the patient on that day,\u201d says Dr. MacPherson. \u201cWe will be able to treat more accurately, and we may be able to treat areas of the body that we couldn\u2019t treat with radiation before because it was just too risky, given the healthy tissue near the tumour.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The
The Ottawa Hospital\u2019s Cancer Centre team\u00a0is very excited to welcome this world-first technology.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

An early adopter<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Our Cancer Centre is now home to the third MR-Linac system in the province, following two centres in Toronto, making us one of the first adopters in the country. This engineering marvel has come to the nation\u2019s capital thanks to the generous support of The Ottawa Hospital, Cancer Care Ontario, community donors and industry vendor Elekta, which supplied the MR-Linac.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWe can deliver a radiation treatment that\u2019s exactly personalized for the patient on that day.\u201d The Ottawa Hospital Cancer Centre is now one of the first in Canada to acquire the state-of-the-art MR-Linac radiation therapy system. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":83245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[13,67],"class_list":["post-83242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-healthy-tomorrows","tag-cancer","tag-innovation"],"acf":[],"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83242\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ottawahospital.on.ca\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}