At Canberra Hospital, we offer a range of state-of-the-art radiation therapy technologies to treat a wide variety of cancers. Each treatment is carefully planned and tailored to your individual needs. Your radiation oncologist will discuss which approach is best suited for your care.
Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT)
This technique delivers a continuous beam of radiation, as the machine rotates around you. The beam, adjusts its shape and intensity in real time.
This technique ensures you are getting the exact dose, in the exact place where you need it.
By combining precision with efficiency, VMAT enhances your comfort, minimises movement during treatment, and improves protection for surrounding healthy tissues and organs.
Image-Guided Radiotherapy (IGRT)
This technique captures images, such as X-rays or CT scans, before or during each treatment session to confirm the tumour’s exact position. This ensures the radiation beams are delivered accurately, even if the patient or internal organs have shifted slightly since planning. The process helps therapists to make immediate changes which can significantly improve the precision of the machine and the confidence to target the exact place for radiotherapy.
Surface-Guided Radiotherapy (SGRT)
This technology uses advanced 3D camera systems to continuously track the patient’s body contours in real time throughout treatment. By comparing the patient’s live surface with their planned setup, the system ensures accurate alignment without the need for permanent skin tattoos. This technology is very precise and more comfortable for patients and is particularly valuable for techniques that require strict motion control, such as breast or SBRT treatments (see below).
Stereotactic Radiosurgery (SRS)
This specialised form of radiation therapy delivers a single, very high dose of radiation to small, well-defined brain lesions. It’s so precise, it can target a lesion within a sub-millimetre. Despite the term “surgery,” it is completely non-invasive and relies on advanced imaging to achieve exceptional accuracy. This procedure treats small brain tumours and is able to minimise radiation exposure to surrounding healthy brain tissue.
Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy (SBRT)
This treatment technique applies the same high-precision principles as Stereotactic Radiosurgery but is used for small tumours located elsewhere in the body, such as the lung, bone, lymph nodes, liver, or prostate. It delivers a few very high-dose treatments (typically between three and five doses) again, with sub-millimetre accuracy. It is particularly useful for patients who are not surgical candidates, offering a safe, effective, and convenient alternative to traditional long-course radiotherapy.
Motion Management
Motion Management is a set of techniques to keep the patient as still as possible, even their organs. For example, breathing can cause movement during imaging and treatment. It involves temporarily pausing breathing to stabilise the tumour’s position, which minimises radiation exposure to nearby organs. Other advanced imaging techniques capture the tumours’ motion throughout the breathing cycle. This helps clinicians to visualise and plan with greater accuracy when the organ moves. These methods improve the precision of the dose and safety for other moving targets like the lungs, liver, and breast.
Superficial / Orthovoltage Therapy
These therapies use low-energy X-rays to treat cancers or benign lesions that lie close to the skin surface, such as basal or squamous cell skin cancers. The shallow penetration of these beams makes them ideal for targeting surface-level tissues while minimising radiation to deeper structures.