History: West China Hospital of Sichuan University is one of the earliest institutions to establish radiotherapy for tumors in China. Its history can be traced back to the Union Church Hospital in the 1930s, when the first case of a cervical cancer patient was treated with a radium needle by the doctors from United States, Canada and United Kingdom in 1936. After the Oncology Department was established in 1958, the cobalt 60 treatment units made by the former Soviet Union and Canada were used to carry out tumor chemo-radiotherapy. The Department of Radiation Oncology, set up in 1997, was the first batch of treatment centers to carry out MLC conformal radiotherapy and rotating irradiation in China with an advanced Varian 2300 CD medical linear accelerator at that time. In 2006, the first medical accelerator with cone beam CT for image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT) in Asia was installed in the department which has been treated as the training base of the IGRT technique since then. Subsequently, the stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) technique for patient treatment was implemented with this accelerator. In 2016 and 2017, 4 new treatment units (1 VARIAN Edge electron linac, 1 ELEKTA Versa HD linacand 2 ELEKTA Synergy linacs) were equipped in the department, which represented the world's leading equipment for radiotherapy. In 2018, the Department of Radiotherapy was set up with the combination of the radiation oncologists, medical physicists and therapists from the cancer center and the radiation physics technical center respectively, to meet the development of West China Hospital.
Professional Team: The Department, with a strong professional team of 24 certified physicians, 17 medical physicists and 47 therapists and medical engineers, is one of the biggest radiation treatment centers in China, with the treatment of over 500 cases each day.
Major Equipment: The Department has 9 treatment facilities: 6 ELEKTA electron linacs (1 Versa HD, 3 Synergy VMAT, 1 Synergy and 1 Precise), 2 VARIAN electron linacs (1 Edge and 1 CX) and 1 AccStar electron linac (China’s top medical demonstration equipment); over 20 treatment planning systems and correlation systems (Pinnacle, Eclipse, Raystation, Monaco, XIO, OnCentra, ABAS, MIM, etc.); and large radiotherapy-related medical equipment: PET-CT scanner, MRI simulator, CT simulator, conventional simulator, ultrasonic volume meters, Calypso electromagnetic guidance systems, Catalyst laser surface imaging systems, etc..
Current Techniques: The deployed techniques include conventional 2D irradiation, conventional isocentric & source-skin distance radiotherapy, tangential radiotherapy, X-ray whole body radiotherapy, 3D conformal radiotherapy, intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT), stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT), volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT), optical surface imaging (OSI) and the target delineation technique based on multiple image fusion.
Leading Features: In China, the Department is leading the research and clinical application of the following related techniques: image-guided intensity modulated radiotherapy, image guided adaptive radiotherapy (IGART), volume rotation intensity modulated therapy, stereotactic radiotherapy, respiratory motion management, PET-CT localization, MRI positioning, etc., with over 100 papers published in the related professional journals all over the word. Typically, a high-risk patient of prostate cancer received the first stereotactic radiotherapy with electromagnetic particle tracking technique in 2007. By using this technique, it can improve the treatment efficiency and shorten the treatment cycle.
Education & Training: The backbone staff of the Department are sent to the United States, Germany, Australia, etc., for their refresh training in turn every year. As one of the training bases of ELEKTA, the Department has trained hundreds of advanced students from various provinces across the country and qualified for graduation. In 2013, the undergraduate program of tumor radiotherapy technology was set up for the first time in colleges and universities in China, and more than 70 students have graduated. And a long-term cooperation and exchange project with Hong Kong Polytechnic University has been conducted, based on an agreement of assigning 5-6 students of the Department to learn the advanced management of radiotherapy every year.
