Your radiation therapy options

Radiation treatment can be given internally (placed inside of your body - prostate seed implants, brachytherapy, mammosite) or externally (from the outside of your body - 3-dimensional radiation, IMRT, SRS, etc.).

When radiation therapy is given internally it is called an invasive treatment option, since requires the entry of a needle, catheter, or other instrument into your body. When radiation therapy is given externally it is a noninvasive treatment option, since it similiar to giving you an X-ray.

Since invasive therapies invade the body they generally come with more side effects than non-invasive therapies. In 2004, Varian introduced the Trilogy linear accelerator, which allowed, for the first time, patients to receive the following non-invasive external beam therapies from one machine:

In 2007, Texas Oncology – Amarillo brought this technology to the Panhandle. RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE

The Trilogy™ System

combines the capabilities of Tomotherapy, Cyberknife and Novalis allowing us to deliver the full spectrum of noninvasive external beam therapies, which means you now have more options.

Trilogy™ can be used to treat most types of cancer, including:
  • breast cancer
  • lung cancer
  • prostate cancer
  • head and neck cancer
  • liver cancer
  • pancreatic cancer
Trilogy™ can also be used to target tumors that lie extremely close to critical structures or organs, such as the spinal cord or, in the case of head and neck cancer, the eyes or the salivary glands.

In the past, patients who had very small tumors were usually not candidates for radiation therapy because doctors had to treat an area significantly larger than the cancerous site. Treatment with Trilogy™ gives these patients another option.

Image-guided radiosurgery was previously limited to tumors of the brain. Now, thanks to advances in imaging, precision beam delivery, treatment planning and patient-positioning technologies, there is new hope for treating previously unreachable tumors, and at earlier stages when the cancer is most curable.

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Benefits of treatment with Trilogy™ include:

  • faster treatments (due to a more powerful machine),
  • greater comfort (the machine takes into account your motion),
  • fewer side effects (due to greater accuracy and lack of incisions or injections) and
  • the potential for better outcomes.
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