Breast Cancer Treatment Options: Radiation Therapy

There are multiple ways to deliver radiation therapy for the breast:

external beam therapy - a treatment that precisely sends high levels of radiation directly to the cancer cells, with a machine controlled by the radiation therapist. Radiation treatments are painless and usually last a few minutes. When treating breast cancer, the entire breast is treated over a 3 to 6 week period, with a portion devoted to delivering a higher dose to the part of the breast that contained the tumor. In some instances, the radiation is also delivered to surrounding lymph nodes.

Stanford has one of the most advanced APBI programs in the United States, which includes:

IORT (intraoperative radiation therapy) - a modification of external beam therapy, the radiation is delivered by a linear accelerator that is actually located in the operating room. Radiation is given through a collimator (cylinder) directly to a portion of the breast during surgery through the open skin incision to the lining of the surgical cavity. This enables a very high dose of radiation to be given at one time to the breast tissue alone, sparing all other surrounding organs, and usually in place of any postoperative treatments.
3D conformal APBI – another modification of external beam therapy which focuses the radiation beam on a part of the breast from which the tumor was removed, rather than the whole breast. The treatments are twice a day over 5 days, instead of 6 weeks.