• 2/17/2006
  • Shreveport, LA
  • James Ramage
  • Shreveport Times (www.shreveportimes.com)

Doctors from Taiwan are so impressed with a relatively new and flexible radiation treatment system for cancer patients that the Willis-Knighton Cancer Center specializes in, called TomoTherapy, they ventured to Shreveport to learn more about it.

And training under cancer center experts here gives the Taiwanese physicians the ability to establish a unit in their own hospital, they said.

From Sunday through Wednesday, two doctors from the radiation oncology department at the 1,200-bed Chung Shan Medical University Hospital, in the city of Taichung, visited Shreveport to learn from the experts at Willis-Knighton, which says, with more than 450 patients treated with TomoTherapy, it is the most experienced in the world at treating cancer patients with the system.

Following an October visit to Taiwan from Dr. Lane Rosen, director of radiation oncology at Willis-Knighton Cancer Center, Drs. Hsien-Chun Tseng and Shih-Tsung Chang during their visit have gained hands-on experience with how TomoTherapy works. They have learned how to use image-guided intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), which employs hundreds of tiny beams of radiation, which can each be controlled to focus on a tumor to destroy cancer cells and minimize radiation to healthy tissue around that tumor, Rosen said.

The system also provides three-dimensional images of the tumor just prior to each treatment and delivers precise doses of radiation from 360 degrees, Rosen said.

“We came here and wanted to see a doctor actually use the machine,” Chang said. “We’ll return to Taiwan to set up our own machine, which will be the first in Taiwan.”

Tseng added that radiation oncologists at Chung Shan held a meeting and invited Rosen and the Willis-Knighton Cancer Center’s chief physicist to Taiwan to speak.

“It is the most advanced technology,” Tseng said. “And the Willis-Knighton Cancer Center is the most experienced in TomoTherapy, so we decided to come here to learn about it.”

Willis-Knighton said it is among the first six cancer centers in the world, and among the first four in the United States, to offer TomoTherapy. The system is not meant to replace standard radiation treatment, which Rosen said is still effective, but gives doctors a greater advantage than regular treatment in attacking pancreatic, prostate, head and neck, brain and lung cancers, Rosen said.

For Doris Parker, of Shelbyville, Texas, TomoTherapy is also far preferable to the chemotherapy she had been receiving to treat her cancer, which she said left her feeling tired, weak and nauseous.

“I’m willing to try anything,” the 58-year-old said.

She was diagnosed with breast cancer in June 2002. By September 2002, she’d had a mastectomy, but by this past January, doctors had found two new tumors around her sternum.

Her treatment dosages last about seven minutes, five days straight for four weeks. Chemotherapy sessions, alternatively, could last up to three hours, she said.

Friday will mark her fourth and last week of TomoTherapy treatment. Although she said she feels good, she will still have to wait another three months before doctors can tell if the cancer is gone.

“I feel really good about it,” Parker said. “There’s no pain with it; I don’t really feel anything with it, except a little tired now and then.”