Radiation therapy plays an increasingly vital role in cancer management. At present more than 50% of all cancer patients can expect to receive radiotherapy during the course of their disease either in primary management (radical or adjuvant radiotherapy) or for symptom control (palliative radiotherapy), says reports of National Center for Biotechnology Information.
Radiation oncology is a unique branch of medicine connected with clinical knowledge and medical physics. In recent past years, this particular approach has become quite absorbed with technological advances.
However, the emphasis on technology is increasing, together with other important changes in the healthcare economic environment.
The NCBI report says new treatment technologies are growing at a rate unprecedented in radiation therapy, paralleled by improvements in computer hardware and software and these techniques allow valuation of changes in the tumour volume and its location during the course of therapy (interfraction motion) so that re-planning can adjust for such changes in an adaptive radiotherapy process.
Hence, if the radiation oncologists become the only guardians of a single therapeutic mode, then they may find that time walks by and, while the techniques will live on, the specialty may not.
Hence, in an exclusive interaction with Dr. Tejinder Kataria, Chairperson, Cancer Institute, Medanta, we tried to understand everything that we need to know about Radiation Oncology and its future.
“Radiation Oncology is a targeted treatment which destroys the DNA that is the genetic code of cancer and it’s a selective destructive agent which does not harm the normal tissues. However, since the tumor sitting within the normal tissues so the algorithm and the computer programming technology is there now by which we can protect the normal tissues and only focus on the targeted tissue, so it’s a very very selective targeted radiation and is one of the keystones or the pillars of cancer treatment,” said Dr. Tejinder Kataria, Chairperson, Cancer Institute, Medanta.
Watch The Full Video Here:
