Yashoda hospitals treats 10,000th cancer patient with RapidArc Radiation Techonology

HYDERABAD, India, June 30, 2015 /PRNewswire/ – A three-year-old baby girl with a brain tumor has become the 10,000th patient at Yashoda Hospitals in Hyderabad, India to be treated using RapidArc® radiotherapy technology from Varian Medical Systems

The treatment comes just six years after RapidArc was first introduced clinically at Yashoda hospital, which treats more than 4,000 patients a year from the states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh in the south-east of India. “The patient responded well to the treatment,” said Dr. G. S. Rao, director of the Yashoda group of hospitals.

Yashoda was the first hospital in India to introduce RapidArc treatments and over the past six years it has phased out the use of ‘static-field’ intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) treatments and replaced them with RapidArc. In so doing, it has become the first hospital to reach the landmark of 10,000 RapidArc treatments.

RapidArc technology delivers fast and precise radiotherapy treatments in single or multiple rotations of the treatment machine around the patient. Faster treatments allow for greater precision, since there is less chance of patient or tumor movement during treatment delivery, and the patient spends less time on the treatment couch.

Over half the RapidArc treatments carried out at Yashoda over the past six years have involved tumors of the brain, head and neck. Three Varian linear accelerators at the hospital are equipped with RapidArc technology, which was introduced by Varian to speed up treatments and make advanced IMRT approaches more widely available to cancer patients globally.

“We see RapidArc as a very efficient and precise way of delivering advanced radiotherapy,” said Dr. Rao. “Because of the speed of RapidArc treatments, we no longer have a waiting list. In fact, we usually start treatments within two days of the patients being taken for CT simulation.”

“Achieving ten thousand treatments so quickly is an impressive milestone for Yashoda Hospitals,” said Ashok Kakkar, Varian’s managing director in India. “We are pleased to see our RapidArc technology making such a huge difference to cancer patients across the south of India.”

Although Yashoda is a private cancer center, it has a strong history of delivering treatments ‘pro bono’ for those who cannot afford advanced radiotherapy. About of a fifth of the center’s RapidArc treatments have fallen into this category. Indeed, for several years it has sent a bus into local villages several times a month and brought patients back to Hyderabad for treatment. The bus, equipped with a wide range of diagnostic equipment, travels to remote villages throughout the province of Andhra Pradesh and screens patients for cancer. If people need treatment, they are brought back to the hospital and treated without charge.

Yashoda Cancer Institute has grown to become one of the Centres of Excellence in the India. With three dedicated, independent Institutes (Somajiguda, Secunderabad & Malakpet), Yashoda Cancer Institutes cater to more than 10, 000 new cancer patients every year from all over India and neighbouring countries.