UVA Health Culpeper Medical Center is undergoing construction to install a new linear accelerator, technology commonly used in the treatment of cancer.
“UVA Health is committed to providing high-quality, comprehensive, and specialized care for greater Culpeper and the surrounding area, and we are excited to announce the addition of a linear accelerator to our complement of cancer treatments,” said Donna Staton, president of UVA Health Culpeper Medical Center. “The new linear accelerator is most commonly used for external beam radiation treatments for cancer patients and the addition of this technology will allow more patients in our community to stay local for their care.”
The project kicked off with the construction of a larger shielded vault to house the new linear accelerator. The new linear accelerator will replace the existing tomotherapy unit which requires patients to lay on a table that slid into a four-foot tunnel and many found the process intimidating. The new linear accelerator removes space restrictions with its open design. The patient lays on a free-standing bed and instead of going into a tunnel, the machine features an arm that comes approximately 33 inches from the patient. Ultimately, the flexibility of the design enables the machine to provide a more comfortable experience, shorter treatments, less noise and more degrees of freedom to pinpoint any area of the body.
“The linear accelerator allows both simpler and complex treatments to be delivered efficiently. There will be several advantages to the new machine,” said Dr. Shiv Khandelwal, radiation oncologist at UVA Health Cancer Care, part of UVA Health Culpeper Medical Center. “The first is that the linear accelerator delivers treatments more rapidly than tomotherapy and with motion management techniques such as deep inspiratory breath hold during which left breast treatment can be delivered while maximizing the distance between the breast radiation target and the heart thereby reducing the radiation dose to the heart to extremely low levels.
“A second advantage, is known as gating,” said Khandelwal. “Gating allows the ability of mapping the motion of the body, such as the lungs. Cameras are mounted on the ceiling offering surface tracking for motion mapping of the body. This technique is quite helpful in cases like early lung cancers. The patient can have a higher dose of targeted radiation in a shorter time and with greater precision that allows doctors to reduce the size of the radiation target. With the case of early lung cancers, a full course of radiation can often be delivered in only five treatments.
“We will be able to offer appropriate prostate cancer patients stereotactic radiotherapy which delivers a high dose in a short time. The prostate moves during treatment delivery so we have not considered it safe to deliver high doses to the prostate on tomotherapy because of tumor motion during the time the machine is delivering treatment. By comparison tomotherapy would take roughly 15 minutes of beam on time to deliver each treatment, whereas the new linear accelerator will take about four minutes.”
The new machine will also have electrons allowing doctors to treat superficial radiation targets, such as skin cancers or other cancers involving the skin, that are thicker than the superficial x-ray therapy unit the facility has for this purpose.
The addition of the new linear accelerator to UVA Health Culpeper Medical Center will offer enhanced treatments for cancer. Reducing procedure times, increasing accuracy of radiation, decrease the effect on healthy tissue, and simplifying procedures are just a few of the benefits. The projected opening of the new technology is spring of 2023.
UVA Health Culpeper Medical Center became part of UVA Health in 2021 and is a 70-bed community hospital with a comprehensive offering of services in emergency, surgery, imaging, women’s and children’s health, heart and vascular, cancer care and rehabilitation.
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Crystal Graham
