The Provincial Hospital of Castellón has chosen World Cancer Day to announce its acquisition of the cutting-edge healthcare technology  radiance™, the world’s only radiosurgery planner. This groundbreaking system allows the clinician to plan the best possible treatment for each particular cancer, calculating by means of software and algorithms the exact radiotherapy dose to be applied to each patient and the tumor bed to be treated once the tumor has been extirpated in the operating theater.

The GMV-developed planner, by determining the right radiotherapy dose beforehand, cuts down the number of post-surgery radiotherapy sessions the patient needs, with the corresponding physical and mental benefits. Optimization of the treatment also contributes towards the sustainability of the healthcare system.

As proven in clinical trials, radiance™ boosts the safety of intraoperative radiotherapy (IORT), helping the specialist to make a complete analysis of the patient and improving pre-surgery decision-making. A good example is the ELIOT y TARGIT trials that made comparisons between IORT-treated patients with small, nonmetastatic breast tumors and others not treated with this technique. In this specific case “a single dose is equivalent to 6 weeks of conventional radiotherapy” in the words of Carlos Illana, GMV’s Product Manager.

GMV has developed radiance™ in collaboration with a set of prestigious hospitals and universities like Hospital La Luz de Madrid, Hospital Doctor Negrín de Las Palmas, Hospital General Universitario Gregorio Marañón, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid and Universidad Complutense de Madrid, among others. It is still collaborating with some of these hospitals and universities and other benchmark international institutions to fine-tune the system to meet the ongoing requirements of specialists. Version 4 is now on the market.

Carlos Ferrer Albiach, Director of the Oncological Institute of the Provincial Hospital of Castellón, spoke as follows about radiance™: “Intraoperative radiotherapy is a technique for directing a single high-intensity radiation dose at the tumor bed during surgery, protecting the surrounding radiation-sensitive healthy tissue”. He goes on: “In the Provincial Hospital of Castellón radiance™ enables us to work more safely, giving us a good idea of what we will find in the operating theater in the area to be irradiated and improving our skills”, adding finally that “this type of technology is indispensable in the twenty-first century”.

Carlos Illana Alejandro, GMV’s Product Manager, stressed the fact that “this technique reduces the recurrence risk in a fair number of tumors (e.g., rectal cancer, sarcomas or breast cancer); its palliative value is also important in other types of hard-to-cure cancers like pancreatic or in relapses”. The patient benefits from “fewer hospital visits; fewer external radiotherapy sessions in certain cases like early breast cancers with favorable prognostic factors, while minimizing overspill effects on surrounding healthy tissue (chronic sequelae)”.