Radiation Therapy

EBRT delivers precise doses of radiation from multiple directions to target a specific area—like the prostate for prostate cancer. Our advanced techniques include:

Hypofractionation

• Used for most diseases, this method divides radiation into larger doses over a shorter timeframe, allowing for a quicker treatment course.

Stereotactic Radiosurgery (SRS) and Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy (SBRT)

• Utilizing advanced imaging, SRS and SBRT precisely target cancer, making them suitable for treating the brain, spine, lung, liver, prostate and other sites. These treatments condense what would typically require 25 to 45 sessions into just 1 to 5 treatments, reducing the overall treatment time significantly. This type of advanced therapy is available at all Nuvance Health radiation locations.

Partial Radiation and Organ-Sparing Techniques

• At Nuvance Health hospitals, we offer partial breast radiation for breast cancer. For the appropriate patient, this allows for treatment of breast cancer after surgery with the same efficacy as older techniques which treated the entire breast. This speeds up the recovery from treatment, often shortens treatment and enhances quality of life.
  

4D CT scans

• We know that the body moves as you breath and we take that into account with a special CT scan that tracks your internal motion through time.  This allows us to make sure the radiation is going where it needs to go to eliminate the cancer. This is most used in lung and gastrointestinal cancer treatments.
  

Deep inspiration breath-hold and respiratory gating

• We are able to configure the radiation machine to only deliver the radiation during certain points in your breathing cycle. This is most commonly used in breast, lung, and gastrointestinal cancers. This allows for sparing of critical organs such as the heart or stomach.
  

Advanced image fusion

• MRI and PET/CT scans may be overlayed with your treatment planning CT scan to enable your physician to pinpoint the cancer target beyond what can be seen on CT scans.
  

Surface skin imaging

• During EBRT many of our sites utilize skin surface imaging to allow for millimeter monitoring of your position during therapy.  At Norwalk hospital this allows for tattoo less treatments.

• In brachytherapy, seeds, ribbons or capsules are placed near or in the tumor, delivered at either a low or high dose rate. 

Intravenous Therapy

• Systemic therapy delivers radiation via the bloodstream to target cancer cells throughout the body. It can be administered orally, through infusion, or by injection.