The creation of a new multimillion dollar cancer center in Muskegon lands the state its first precision radiation therapy equipment for treating cancer patients — therapy that requires just a few minutes for a treatment, accurately pinpoints the size and location of tumors, and reduces damage to healthy tissue.
According to excerpts from the story:
Mercy Health Partners is the first healthcare system in Michigan, and one of the first in the nation to begin treating cancer patients using RapidArc radiotherapy technology.
RapidArc delivers advanced image-guided treatments two to eight times faster than is possible with conventional or standard intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) treatments.
"The first treatments at the Johnson Family Center for Cancer Care have gone very, very well," said Nina Johnson MD, Mercy Health Partners’ medical director for radiation oncology.
"RapidArc gives us the ability to deliver a highly accurate radiation treatment in a very short timeframe. Using standard radiation treatments, patients are typically required to lie perfectly still for as long as 20 minutes. With RapidArc, we can now complete an entire radiation dose in less than two minutes. Not only is it less lying still on the table time, but the speed reduces the chance that the patients will move. This is a huge breakthrough for our patients,” she said.
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