A multidisciplinary medical team at the Universitas Academic Hospital and the University of the Free State (UFS) in Bloemfontein is advancing interstitial brachytherapy as a method for treating cervical cancer patients. The team safely completed the use of brachytherapy to treat a patient in June, thereby becoming the first in South Africa to use this method.
The team of practitioners consists of an anaesthetist, clinical oncologists, application specialists, medical physicists, radiation therapy radiographers, and professional nurses.
Brachytherapy is a form of internal radiation that involves intraoperative placement of a small radioactive source inside or near the cancer. Targeted for cervical cancer treatment, it is envisaged to save numerous patients.
Prof. Alicia Sherriff, head of the Department of Oncology at the university, said the UFS was planning to expand the use to treat other cancers, while other academic training institutions aim to add brachytherapy to their platforms.
“This type of radiation travels only a short distance and makes it possible to deliver curative doses to the cancer while staying within the tolerance of the surrounding bladder, rectum, and small bowel.”
She said this achievement was a result of intensive work started years ago.
“At the Universitas Academic Complex we have been approaching cervical brachytherapy with computer tomography (CT) based image guidance for more than a decade already.
“These past five years we have been doing adaptive CT-based image guided brachytherapy. This means that with each brachytherapy treatment, the cancer and all the surrounding normal organs are delineated based on a new CT image to ensure that we consider how the cancer has shrunk from one brachytherapy to the next, and to see how we can limit the dose to the surrounding organs, achieving the highest possible dose of radiation with each treatment,” said Sherriff.
She revealed that feasibility studies had been published for the use of applicators that combine intracavitary and interstitial brachytherapy in 2006.
“In 2014 prospective clinical trials started reflecting on the value to improve local control for the locally advanced cervical cancers, combining intracavitary and interstitial brachytherapy to get higher doses of radiation where the cancer has grown outside of the cervix.
Sherriff said according to medical history, intracavitary brachytherapy has been an essential component of the curative management of cervical cancer since 1938.
