An African first for city hospital

For the first time on African soil, patients with cancers difficult to treat will have the option of using new radio-oncology equipment for easier and quicker treatment. The equipment - Novalis Radiosurgery - is soon to be available at Cape Town's Life Vincent Pallotti Hospital.

Doctors Samuel Bral, from Belgium, and Charles Valery, from France, have been visiting Cape Town to assist with training. They described how the equipment made it possible to target and treat previously untreatable tumours and growths quickly and more accurately. Bral said the equipment made it possible to treat a precise location, directing the dose to the affected area and away from healthy tissue.

He described the treatment as similar to a laser, but using energy from accelerated electrons rather than light. The combined technology includes a positioning system, treatment planning software and a linear accelerator. Bral described the machine as similar to a "well-equipped, highly effective" Rolls Royce, where usual treatment would be a simple car. Valery said an advantage when dealing with a brain tumour was that the equipment could be used to treat deep locations where surgery was not an option.

The benefits include: faster treatment times - treatments that took an hour or more would now take as little as 30 minutes; increased accuracy - larger cranial and spinal tumours would be treated more accurately; improved targeting - tumours would be precisely targeted to protect normal tissue; radiosurgery and therapy would be possible for tumours with unusual shapes; spinal and brain tumours that were previously untreatable could be treated; radiosurgery would be more comfortable; and communication between specialists would be simplified.

More than 300 clinics across the world use this system and have completed more than a million treatments.

Cape Times, 5 November 2013