Gangnam Severance conducts 1st intraoperative radiotherapy for glioblastoma

Gangnam Severance Hospital said it has recently conducted Korea’s first intraoperative radiotherapy (IORT) using intrabeam to a patient with glioblastoma, a type of malignant brain tumor.

Professors Cho Yeon-ah (left) and Yoo Ji-whan conduct intraoperative radiotherapy on the glioblastoma patient at the Gangnam Severance Hospital in southern Seoul on May 24.

General radiation therapy is possible only three to four weeks after surgery when the surgical site is stable. There is also a limitation in not irradiating sufficient radiation due to the normal organs adjacent to the treatment site.

To resolve such issues, foreign hospitals have been using IORT to reduce the treatment period significantly. Since physicians can irradiate high-dose radiation by making direct contacts near the surgical site, the method is attracting attention as a way to increase the survival rate of glioblastoma patients with high malignancy and poor prognosis.

In the case of other cancer types that widely use IORT, such as breast cancer, IORT showed that it could shorten the treatment period by one to two weeks, and the incidence of complications or side effects was similar or lower than that of conventional treatments.

Therefore, the team, led by Professors Park Hyun-ho and Yoo Ji-whan of the Neurology Department, and Cho Yeon-ah of the Radiology Department, conducted the IORT on a 40-year-old male glioblastoma patient. Immediately after Professor Park removed the tumor by surgery, Professors Yoo and Cho used an intrabeam device for IORT to directly irradiate the surgical site with radiation.

So far, the patient is in good condition with no specific findings.

“The intrabeam developed exclusively for IORT can approach very close to the operating table, shortening the radiation treatment period for patients,” Professor Yoo said. “Notably, glioblastoma has a high malignancy and a rapid recurrence, so shortening the treatment period is very important.”

Professor Cho also said, “We can use IORT while directly checking the lesion site during surgery, enabling accurate irradiation as most glioblastomas recur near the surgical site.”

Although general radiation therapy has the disadvantage of not increasing the dose due to unnecessary radiation to adjacent organs, IORT can greatly reduce the dose to the surrounding tissues while giving a high dose near the tumor, Cho added.