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Brachytherapy: A Tool for Fighting Cancer

Imagine you are camping at night, and you are sitting inside a tent. You want to read a book, but it is too dark. If someone outside the tent shines a flashlight at the book, that might help – you might be able to do some reading, especially if the person with the flashlight is not too far away. If the person with the flashlight gets very close to the tent, it will probably be easier to read your book. If you have a flashlight with you inside the tent and you hold your flashlight right up next to the pages of the book, then you are really in business! Brachytherapy is a little like this flashlight, because doctors deliver a dose of radiation right up close to tumor cells instead of treating them from farther away.

There are several ways to treat cancer using radiation. [...] When healthcare providers use beams of radiation from outside the patient, like with the linear accelerator, that is a little like shining the flashlight from outside of the tent. This is a great option, especially if doctors can aim the beam very carefully at the target. Another way to treat cancer with radiation is by using little pieces of radioactive metal. If doctors put the radioactive source right into the tumor that they are trying to treat, the cancer cells will get a high dose of radiation. This is what is done in brachytherapy.

Radiation Seeds and Extra Special Robots

There are several ways healthcare providers can deliver brachytherapy treatments. The first one that we will talk about is to use lots of little capsules, called seeds. Even though they are called seeds, these are a lot different than the kind of seeds you use in your garden! These seeds are pretty small – they are each about the size of a grain of rice. A doctor can surgically implant these seeds directly inside a tumor. The seeds stay in place inside and, because they are radioactive, they release radiation right where the cancer is.

In another type of brachytherapy, healthcare providers can use a robot called an afterloader that controls where the radioactive source is placed in the patient. This robot can move the source through special tubes into the inside of a patient. When the treatment is over, the robot removes the source from the patient. When the radiation source is not being used for treatment, it sits inside a container inside the robot. That container is made of lead so that it blocks radiation. The afterloader can be controlled from outside the treatment room, so the doctor and other members of the healthcare team can be outside of the room while the source is outside of its special container and is being used to treat the patient. This makes delivering radiation safer for the medical team, because they are not exposed to radiation each time they treat a patient.

Available at: https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/ frym.2024.1378550. Accessed on: July 27, 2024.