A new cancer treatment — completed within one to five sessions that each take 20 minutes or less — will be available to patients at the Josephine Ford Cancer Institute at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit starting this week. In comparison, other systems can take more than an hour per session.
The Edge Radiosurgery Suite — which is available only at two sites, the other being the Champalimaud Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal — uses stereotactic radiation to deliver intense radiation doses to tumor targets while minimizing dose exposure to surrounding healthy tissue.
“In radiosurgery, millimeters matter,” says Dr. Steven N. Kalkanis, director of the Center for Cancer Surgery at Henry Ford. “The Edge Radiosurgery Suite is calibrated for sub-millimeter accuracy. That will help us rest assured that we are doing everything possible to protect normal tissues.”
The non-invasive cancer procedure can be done anywhere in the body — including the brain, spine, head and neck, adrenal gland, lung, liver, and pancreas — and takes 10 to 20 minutes per treatment.
Using real-time tumor tracking technology and motion management capabilities, the treatment builds upon the hospital’s background in radiation, says Benjamin Movsas, chair of the hospital’s Department of Radiation Oncology.
“The Edge truly represents a novel platform in radiosurgery, offering a system that provides a fully-integrated solution for planning and administering radiosurgery treatments,” Movsas says.
