CyberKnife technology to treat cancer in India

By GottaLaff

This new treatment option sounds fantastic:

NEW DELHI: Offering hope in several cases of technically inoperable tumours, the most advanced CyberKnife robotic radio surgery system will be available to cancer patients from next week at the Apollo Specialty Cancer hospital, Chennai. [...]

"This technology will offer a new treatment option that would revolutionise cancer treatment in India," Prathap C. Reddy, executive chairman, Apollo Hospitals Group, told reporters here Saturday. [...]

Apart from being the only machine of its kind in South Asia, the CyberKnife is unique in its design. It offers large dosages of targeted radiation controlled with image guided technology and computer robotics.

"The advanced technology behind CyberKnife uses real time image guidance technology and computer controlled robotics to deliver an extremely precise dose of radiation to targets, thereby avoiding the surrounding healthy tissue and adjusting for patient and tumour movement during treatment," explained John Rodenbeck Adler, professor of Neurosurgery and oncology at the Stanford University Medical Centre.

"The procedure requires no anaesthesia, as the treatment is painless and non-invasive,"said Adler, who is in India to create awareness about the machine.

The treatment has a higher rate of success with small tumours, and generally lasts between 30 to 90 minutes involving administration of 100-200 radiation beams delivered from different directions each lasting 10 to 15 seconds. The machine's robotic arm works continually with image guided technology and has the ability to move in three dimensions according to the treatment plan. [...]

This treatment can also successfully treat lung cancers and other such cancers that are on organs that move involuntarily - like in the respiratory or digestive system.

The treatment that formally began at Stanford in 1994, has had about 60,000 beneficiaries so far, with around 98 percent success rate in dealing with benign tumours and about 95 percent in dealing with malignant tumours. It has a three percent complication risk, Adler informed.

It's nice that we have it here in the U.S.A. where science is acceptable again.

(Note: I edited the last sentence of this post to correct an error. H/t: Silly Git)

Ted Kennedy responding well to treatment

By GottaLaff

Good! Good, good, good:

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) is responding well to radiation and chemotherapy treatments for brain cancer, his wife reported in an e-mail to friends and family obtained Monday by The Associated Press.

The senator is tired, but otherwise doing well, the AP reports.

He exercises every morning before his treatments. Excellent.

"The only side effect is fatigue, and that word has never been in Teddy's vocabulary before," Vicki Kennedy e-mailed. "But he's learning to cope with it. As I have mentioned to many of you, he is tackling cancer with his trademark grit and determination, and he is doing everything he needs to do to regain his strength and health." [...]

Vicki has drawn the line at letting her husband go sailing in thunderstorms, but other than that reports that he sails nearly every day.

I don't even like to drive in thunderstorms, and he wants to go sailing in one. Go, Teddy!

Senator Kennedy is planning to go back to work in September.