ROME – Rome Memorial Hospital broke ground on Thursday, September 9 at 9:30 a.m. for a 2,600-square foot cancer treatment addition to the hospital’s Mohawk Valley Radiation Medicine site, announced hospital President and CEO Darlene Burns, MS, RN.

The new cancer treatment center, located at the hospital’s Chestnut Commons site at 107 E. Chestnut Street, will house a linear accelerator which will allow cancer patients to be treated with intensity modulated radiation therapy, also known as IMRT, and respiratory gating.

Both IMRT and respiratory gating allow lung and other cancers to be treated with precise accuracy resulting in less damage to the surrounding tissue, and therefore, fewer side effects from treatment and a higher cure rate, said Dr. Linda Schicker, board certified radiation oncologist.

“IMRT is one of the most technologically advanced treatment methods available in external beam radiation therapy,” said Dr. Schicker. “Traditional radiation therapy uses a uniform radiation beam. With IMRT, the radiation is effectively broken up into thousands of tiny pencil-thin radiation beams of varied intensity. With millimeter accuracy, these beams enter the body from many angles and intersect in the tumor,” she explained.

IMRT can be used to treat many different types of cancer, including tumors in the prostate, brain, pancreas, liver, breast, head, neck and lungs. In some cases it even allows the hospital to retreat cancers which have previously been irradiated. It also allows safer treatment of tumors which are located very close to delicate organs like the eye, spinal cord or rectum.

“The advancement here is in our ability to more precisely target only the cancerous tissue,” said radiation therapist Amy Weakley. “When nearby healthy tissue is not at risk, we can avoid treating it and thereby reduce the side effects of treatment. The higher the dose of radiation we can safely deliver, the greater the hope for curing the patient.”

Mohawk Valley Radiation Medicine was the first to bring radiation therapy to Rome, the only IMRT in Rome, and now, will become the first facility in all of Central New York to provide respiratory gating. This evolution in computer-aided cancer treatment provides precise and powerful treatment of lung and other cancers.

“A lung tumor can move as much as four centimeters with each breath. The new technology is able to track when a patient breathes, so the treatment beam is activated only when the tumor is in range,” explained Schicker. “Respiratory gating allows us to target the tumor with less exposure to the surrounding healthy tissue. Therefore, we can increase the dose of radiation to the tumor and deliver more effective treatment with fewer side effects.”

The new cancer treatment center addition was designed and will be constructed by the Charles Gaetano Construction Company, Utica. Visual therapy, which allows patients to relax and refocus during cancer treatment, is being incorporated in the design. (See www. visualtherapy.com) It is anticipated that the new facility will open in March 2005.

“Rome Memorial Hospital is investing over $2 million in new cancer treatment technology in 2004 to continue to offer greater hope in the fight against cancer,” said Burns.

The hospital and Dr. Schicker introduced radiation therapy to Rome in December 1997 at Mohawk Valley Radiation Medicine.