The University of Maryland's Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Cancer Center is among the first cancer centers in the nation to treat patients with Trilogy, a new image-guided radiation therapy system from Varian Medical Systems that delivers high-dose radiation to even the smallest tumors. The equipment can target an area as small as a pencil point, minimizing the damage to healthy tissue. It also reportedly delivers radiation doses more than 60 percent faster than conventional linear accelerators used to treat cancer, which means that patients can receive treatments in much less time.
The Trilogy linear accelerator can deliver all forms of external-beam radiation therapy, from conventional radiation treatment and intensity modulated radiation therapy to image-guided radiotherapy and stereotactic body radiotherapy. Trilogy's built-in imaging system can pinpoint the size and location of a patient's tumor moments before each treatment, and a "respiratory gating" component automatically synchronizes the radiation beam to the patient's breathing.
Trilogy rotates around the patient to deliver radiation treatments from virtually every angle and sculpts the beam to the shape of the tumor. Imaging equipment in robotically controlled arms mounted on the machine provides real-time images used to automatically adjust the patient's position. The system provides several kinds of images, including three-dimensional computed tomography scans.