Cardiac-sparing radiation therapy
This type of radiation therapy uses advanced breath-hold technology to reduce radiation exposure to your heart during treatment for breast and chest cancers, helping you receive effective cancer care with added protection.
Deep Inspiration Breath Hold
While radiation therapy is a highly effective treatment for cancers in the breast, upper abdomen, and chest, treatment of these areas exposes the nearby heart to radiation.
Atlantic Health helps prevent this unintentional radiation damage to the heart through a technique known as Deep Inspiration Breath Hold (DIBH). The DIBH consists of taking a deep breath and holding it throughout treatment. This simple-seeming technique effectively moves the heart out of range of the treatment, protecting it from radiation.
State-of-the-art equipment improves upon the DIBH technique by monitoring the patient’s positioning, including the expansion of the chest during a DIBH, with sub-millimeter accuracy. The equipment alerts radiologists if the patient moves out of proper positioning – when exhaling, for example. This has been shown to substantially decrease abnormalities in blood flow to the heart as long as six-months post treatment.