The TomoTherapy® Hi-Art® treatment system is one of the tools used by the Hollings Cancer Center to deliver radiation treatments.  With the Hi-Art system, the radiation can be shaped to the tumor and can significantly reduce or eliminate a dose to surrounding tissue.  Therefore there may be a reduction of side-effects.  Patients can be treated with higher doses and shorter overall treatment times. Tomotherapy allows us to treat some tumors that were previously untreatable. It also makes some difficult cases easier to treat.

The Hi-Art treatment system offers several advantages over traditional radiation therapy for certain patients:

• It looks like a CT scanner because it is a CT scanner, allowing efficient CT imaging to help ensure the accuracy of treatment 
• It leverages the ring gantry geometry used in CT scanning for the delivery of state-of-the-art, intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) from all angles around the patient
• It was designed so that highly-precise treatment plans could result in more effective treatment deliveries

Most conventional radiation therapy machines use 5-9 beam angles, and were developed for 2D and 3D conformal therapy. The Hi·Art treatment system delivers radiation continuously from all angles around the patient, and features patented beam-shaping technology created specifically for IMRT.  More beam angles, plus more precise beam modulation, creates dose distributions that conform to complex tumor shapes.