Patient benefits
By using IORT, the local control is always elevated and toxicity is extremely reduced.
This can be of great advantage for the patient, since long waiting lists are no longer required and the overall exposure to radiations is reduced.
The entire procedure of IORT treatment requires about 10 minutes while surgery is performed, under anaesthesia.
A single dose of radiation delivered on the tumor site has the same biological efficacy and is even more powerful than the same dose delivered in a fractionated treatment (a single IORT dose produces biological effects 1,2 – 1,5 times higher than a complete cycle of fractionated external beam irradiation).
The radiation dose is delivered exclusively to the tumor bed where the risk of tumor recurrency is high. All surrounding tissues are excluded from the radiation beam, in order to reduce the damage to healthy tissues, thus increasing the therapeutic efficacy/toxicity ratio.
Recent technical advantages of the IORT technique consist in the direct visual control of the target volume and in the possibility to protect the surrounding healthy tissues, by simply moving or shielding them from the radiation beam direction.
Electron beams can be delivered in a homogeneous dose at a controlled depth of the tissue layer of the tumor bed. The local control is always elevated and toxicity is extremely reduced.
Ongoing clinical research is focusing on the reasons for possible treatment failure. Gastric neoplasies, pancreatic tumors, colon-rectal cancers and sarcomas are in fact all associated with a high rate of recurrency. Long term results of using IORT therapy using electrons show a higher survival rate in respect to external conventional radiation therapy.
New application fields of IORT include breast cancer, lung cancer, bladder and cervical cancer.