Prostate Cancer

Advanced treatment options at Intermountain Medical Center use new technology to offer new hope to men with prostate cancer.

The cancer center offers two treatment options for prostate cancer:

• Intensity-modulated radiation therapy, which is high-precision radiation treatment with an image-guided linear accelerator. Intermountain Healthcare cancer experts are national leaders in advancing the use of intensity-moduled therapy; we've used it for the past four years and have been active in studying its use and sharing our findings with other experts across the county.
• Image-guided radiation therapy involves the placement of markers in the prostate to track the prostate position precisely, which allows medical experts to avoid healthy tissues as much as possible during treatment. The typical result is the rate of side-effects is lower compared to methods that use bigger radiation fields. Image-guided treatments also use smaller-voltage X-rays to localize the markers in the prostate gland, which allows us to visualize them more clearly and from various angles. For instance, if a patient has an artificial hip, we can use new angles to identify the markers and see the prostate more clearly.

Another advanced treatment option - Cone beam CT scanning

Intermountain Medical Center is the first hospital in Utah to have cone beam computed tomography scanning built into a radiation treatment machine. The technology allows us to evaluate a patient's internal anatomy before each treatment. This benefits patients because clinicians can locate the tumor at the time of treatment, which allows more precise treatment of the tumor and an increased ability to avoid healthy tissue and potentially reduce side-effects. Our clinicians will use cone beam technology in concert with image-guided radiation therapy and will continue to work with other cancer centers around the U.S. to expand its use and effectiveness.

The result is more options and greater hope for prostate cancer patients throughout the Intermountain West.