Region leading the way in treatment of lung tumours

Experts at the Yorkshire Cancer Centre in Leeds are using new software to accurately see tumours in motion as patients with lung cancer breathe.

Five-year survival rates for lung cancer remain low compared with other cancers but doctors at the centre at St James's Hospital are using the technique, stereotactic body radiotherapy, which better targets tumours.

This can treat patients with potentially curable disease for whom conventional surgery is too risky and gives minutely-targeted radiation doses around three times more powerful than conventional treatments.

But in some cases, tumours remain a blurry image on scans because they are moving as patients breathe or because they are so small.

Jonathan Sykes, joint lead radiotherapy imaging physicist in Leeds, said this made it more difficult to accurately target the tumour for effective treatments.

"It's like trying to take a picture of a fast-moving object using a camera that has a slow shutter speed," he said.

Four patients have so far been treated using new imaging technology, described by cancer specialist Kevin Franks as "invaluable".

Without it, the treatment margins around tumours would have to be increased, risking damage to healthy tissue.

The first patient to benefit was a 67-year-old woman whose tumour was less than half an inch in size. It rode up and down as she breathed and all experts could see on images was a blur of motion.

"Treating a small tumour with this kind of motion would normally have excluded her from aggressive treatments such as stereotactic body radiation therapy, particularly if you can't see it well on imaging studies," Mr Franks said. But the new software had provided sufficient quality to enable specialists to isolate the moving tumour and allow her to receive treatment.