Hospitals add procedures to treat cancer

Cancer patients throughout the region will soon have access to revolutionary new treatments now that both Cape Girardeau hospitals plan to begin offering stereotactic radiosurgery, a noninvasive procedure to treat tumors and other lesions.

On Monday, Southeast Missouri Hospital received unanimous approval from the Missouri Facilities Review Commission for a $2.7 million certificate of need to become the first hospital in Missouri to offer Novalis shaped beam surgery.

Meanwhile, St. Francis Medical Center is also offering stereotactic radiosurgery for the treatment of brain tumors. The first patient is already scheduled for Dec. 15.

At Southeast, the new Novalis equipment -- which should be available in spring -- enables doctors to treat tumors of the brain, head, neck, spine, liver, lung and prostate without harming surrounding healthy tissue.

Dr. Scott Gibbs, a Cape Girardeau neurosurgeon, has been lobbying Southeast Missouri Hospital to get the equipment for three years. Gibbs said Novalis is considered the most sophisticated approach to stereotactic radiosurgery available today.

With the pinpoint delivery of radiation to lesions, patients can be treated in an outpatient 15-minute procedure that before often involved brain surgery that debilitated patients for months.

The procedure is available to both children and adults, Gibbs said.

"Before, sometimes all doctors could tell you was that they could send you to hospice," Gibbs said. "Hospice is a wonderful thing, but it's for terminal patients and offers little hope. Novalis offers hope."

At St. Francis Medical Center's Cancer Institute, the hospital is offering what it describes as a state-of-the-art linear accelerator, which can be used to deliver focused beams of high-energy radiation to kill brain tumors.

Dr. Tapan Roy, a radiation oncologist at the Cancer Institute, said the hospital has bought a special attachment that will deliver high-energy radiation with great precision to afflicted areas of the brain.

"If our target is one centimeter in size -- the size of a dime -- radiation outside that target is very minimal." Roy said.

smoyers@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137