Radiation oncology firm Elekta has revealed doctors at Northampton General Hospital, U.K., have used "monotherapy" high dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy for the first time to treat a patient with prostate cancer.
With this treatment, the patient made only two visits within a two-week period to the hospital's cancer center. With conventional external beam radiotherapy (EBRT), the patient would have had as many as 40 treatment sessions over a seven week period. This particular patient had inflammatory bowel disease and could not tolerate a full course of EBRT, according to the patient's oncologist Dr. Chris Elwell.
The Elekta-owned company Nucletron's HDR real-time prostate solution software that provides real-time ultrasound planning capabilities was used to plan the procedure.
Monotherapy HDR brachytherapy is the subject of rigorous multicenter clinical research trials in the U.K., with new treatment protocols emerging for the procedure.
