We welcome the opportunity to discuss with you whether you are a candidate for treatment through the Inova Thoracic Oncology Program. Please contact our patient care navigator for more information.
Inova Health System physicians have the expertise and technological support to offer a comprehensive array of surgical and medical options to treat thoracic cancers and conditions.
Surgery Today lung cancer is increasingly diagnosed early, which makes surgery a more effective treatment option. The new minimally invasive techniques available at Inova are especially beneficial for patients who are good candidates. Instead of a large incision, surgeons make two small incisions two to four centimeters each. Patients who undergo minimally invasive surgery experience less pain and a faster recovery. This is especially helpful for those who must recover from surgery before beginning a complementary regimen of chemotherapy.
Esophageal cancer surgery is particularly challenging because it is often advanced by the time it is diagnosed. Multiple integrated treatment approaches may be needed for a successful outcome.
Inova offers these surgical techniques for thoracic cancers and conditions:
Radiation oncology Our radiation oncology team offers a full complement of radiation services – more than any other program in the Washington, DC, metropolitan area. Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy Stereotactic Body Radiation Therapy (SBRT) is a promising new treatment for patients with early-stage, inoperable lung cancer. This advanced technique uses special positioning and real-time image guidance to localize tumors and deliver a high dose of radiation with unsurpassed precision, sparing healthy tissue. SBRT is improving cure rates among lung cancer patients who are unable to have surgery, either due to tumor location or because of health conditions that make surgery risky. Read more about Trilogy External Radiation Therapy Linear Accelerator-based Trilogy® and 21EX with On-Board Imaging (OBI) are the evolutionary result of a decade of research in intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). OBI can precisely reproduce patient position with biplane X-rays, using either bones or implanted gold seeds for fiducials. In addition, it can render CT images of the treatment area for precise location of internal organs and tumors just before treatment, significantly reducing the radiation dose to adjacent structures. Daily treatment takes about 20 minutes. TomoTherapy® The first treatment method designed from the ground up for IMRT, TomoTherapy® has been in clinical use since 2004. As in a CT, the radiation beam rotates in a helical pattern about the central treatment couch. It is composed of 64 tiny “beamlets,” each of which can be modulated independently, every seven degrees, as the array rotates. This enormous number of variables, driven by a parallel-processing computer, achieves complex radiation dose distributions surpassing CyberKnife®. Daily treatment takes about 20 minutes.
Other nonsurgical treatments
