Radiation machine could cut cancer treatments in half

The Stanford Cancer Center today unveiled a breakthrough radiation machine it hopes will let patients spend less time getting treatments and more time living their lives.

By delivering radiation at a faster dose rate, the TrueBeam linear accelerator can shorten individual treatment times by up to a half compared with treatments from traditional machines, according to a statement from the center.

The TrueBeam's treatments can also more accurately target cancerous tumors than typical machines do. That's thanks, in part, to a 4D imaging system that captures views in 60 percent less time than in previous machines, which results in less blurry images. It can target cancerous tissue with the precision of less than 1 millimeter by checking against 100,000 data points every 10 milliseconds.