Published: Thursday, February 7, 2013 1:06 AM CST

The Avera Sacred Heart Cancer Center in Yankton is adding a new technology to make radiation treatment more comfortable for patients, and more accurate for doctors.The Cancer Center is getting a new Varian Linear Accelerator, which is the device that produces radiation beams for radiation therapy.

“This type of accelerator is very advanced. With the old accelerator we had, it only let us take x-ray pictures of patients, which are two-dimensional,” said Dr. Michael Peterson, radiation oncologist at the Cancer Center. “This one can do three-dimensional CAT scan images, which allows us to get much more detailed information about where the patient is positioned in relation to the beam the way we want them to be.”

He added that the new machine can detect skin marks and how they shift in relation to the organ that doctors are trying to reach.

“If you actually have a CT-like image, it gives you much better assurance that doctors will be able to hit the treatment area in exactly the way they want to,” Peterson said. “This means there is less of a need to treat normal tissue around the tumor to make sure you’re hitting the area you want every time.”

The machine will do a special type of treatment where its head can rotate around the patient, allowing doctors to conduct a treatment during which the dose prescribed goes exactly where they want it to around the tumor. The new treatment is also faster than it was before. With older machines, radiation therapy treatment could take around 20 minutes, but with the machine it could take fewer than 10 minutes.

“This machine not only does some things better and more accurately with improved treatment quality, but it also does them faster as well, making treatment more comfortable for the patient,” Peterson said. “This machine will be helpful, not only in terms of voluntary motion by the patient, but also by minimizing the amount of involuntary movement of the patient.”

The new device could mean the difference between a patient getting some of the long-term side effects of radiation or not getting them at all because of how precisely the new machine is.

“Patients on the new machine will be treated more comfortably as well. Instead of having them try to hold still for more than 20 minutes when a certain part of their body is hurting, they will have less pain on the treatment table and will be more convenient for them as well,” Peterson said.

Another advantage of the new machine is that it has thinner leaves then the old one, meaning it is able to treat infected areas more precisely.

“If we want to be able to treat a certain area, having wider leaves on the machine is not good,” he said. “We are able to treat areas with more accuracy with thinner leaves on the machine.”

The new accelerator has leaves that are about 1/2 cm wide, whereas the old machine had leaves that were about 1 cm.

Although doctors have the machine at the Cancer Center now, they will not be able to treat patients with it until later this winter.

“We can’t say for certain when we will be able to treat our first patient with the new accelerator until physicists do their final checks on the machine,” Peterson said. “There is a very extensive quality assurance process that all new radiation machines have to go through to make sure, when we prescribe radiation to a patient, that it’s the amount that comes out of the machine and that no beams are stronger than others.”

The machine was delivered to Sacred Heart in December and some other hospitals have had them for a few years, but Peterson notes it does almost all the latest treatments that machines coming out even this year are able to do.

“We couldn’t get the same detail with the older machines,” he said. “The machine we have been using has been here for about seven years. We’re not getting rid of it because it’s on its last legs — we’re getting rid of it because we’re committed to having the best new technology here for treatments.”

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