Cutting Edge Cancer Commitment

It was a ribbon cutting for cutting edge cancer treatment.

Mission Partners from OSF HealthCare Saint Elizabeth Medical Center joined Ottawa area community and business leaders in celebrating completion of a project to enhance diagnostics for patients of OSF Saint Elizabeth Radiation Oncology.

The new 3,800 square foot addition to the Fox River Cancer Center includes a TrueBeam Linear Accelerator.

“其他的一些治疗我们的旧机器might take up to a half an hour," says Aimee Berg, Lead Radiation Therapist at OSF HealthCare Saint Elizabeth Medical Center. "Some of those same treatment could be five minutes on this machine. And based on we can move this couch event more and there's even more imaging, to make sure that we're accurate, everything is going to be extremely precise - even more so than it ever was in the past."

Considered the latest in image-guided radiotherapy technology, the TrueBeam is the first treatment machine in the region to use arc therapy, allowing for faster more accurate treatment. Aimee Berg, Lead Radiation Therapist at OSF HealthCare Saint Elizabeth Medical Center, demonstrates the machine for a simulated brain cancer patient.

"We can go 360 degrees all around the patient," says Aimee Berg, Lead Radiation Therapist at OSF HealthCare Saint Elizabeth Medical Center. "We can move the table any direction we need to. We can rotates it. We can move it up, down, right, left, in, out and we can tilt it as well. So, this patient is going to get treatments from different angles so we can reduce the side-effects going through the other tissues to their tumor."

"These arms that I'm bringing out now help us with our imaging," says Aimee Berg, Lead Radiation Therapist at OSF HealthCare Saint Elizabeth Medical Center. "So, we can take almost a mini, little CAT scan before we treat the patient to see what's going on inside their body. So, we're going to line them up with our laser system for the outside of their body. And then we'll go and take a little scan, or images, to be able to see the inside of their body as well. That lets us be very precise, not just on the skin, but also inside right where the tumor is located."

A new Discovery IQ PET/CT scanner is also part of the expansion. Expected to be operational around the first of the year, it allows two scans to be taken simultaneously to help manage the patient's condition and properly phase the treatment.