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Jul 05, 2023

Norwalk Hospital offers tattoo

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Dr. Philip Gilbo at Nuvance Health Norwalk Hospital next to the new tattoo-less radiation therapy machine.

Nuvance Health Norwalk Hospital's new tattoo-less radiation therapy machine.

NORWALK — Norwalk Hospital is now offering a tattoo-less radiation therapy for all breast cancer patients, leaving them "with as little a reminder" as possible of their rigorous treatments as possible.

"I think it is very meaningful to patients," said Dr. Philip Gilbo, chief of radiation oncology at Norwalk Hospital.

Nuvance Health at Norwalk Hospital is one of the only care centers in Connecticut that offers this new therapy option. Since April, Gilbo said, every breast cancer patient has been receiving the tattoo-less treatment.

"For the first couple of patients that came through, they were coming in with the expectation that they were going to get tattoos and they were ecstatic that they suddenly found they didn't need tattoos," Gilbo said.

"For decades, permanent tattoos have been a necessary component of breast cancer radiation. While some patients are not bothered by the marks, for others it is a constant reminder of a time they want to move past. For these individuals, the new delivery method will be quite meaningful," he said.

Before patients undergo radiation treatments, they have a simulation appointment where their cancer is mapped out and the patient is put in the best position for radiation treatment.

"To get the patient into the right positions, what we will do after the CT scan and what we have done for many, many decades is actually place small tattoos on the skin," Gilbo said.

"They are about the size of the pen mark, but they are permanent, or about as permanent as tattoos can be," he said. "That actually helps us get them into their initial position back on the machine, where we use lasers and different measurements to re-create the settings from the simulation."

Now, patients at Norwalk Hospital's Nancy Jones Beard Radiation Oncology Unit at the C. Anthony and Jean Whittingham Cancer Center will no longer be permanently marked with a reminder of the treatments they are undergoing.

"We will use instead these infrared sensors to get the patient back into the position, based of their skin surface," Gilbo said. "It is like surface-mapping, with the sensors to this eliminating the need to give them any tattoos."

The new system uses 3D cameras with sensors to monitor a patient's position before and during radiation, and ensures the beams are precisely targeted to the desired areas, he said. This allows for real-time tracking and the treatment to be stopped if the system senses any movement.

"Radiation is a very precise treatment — we work in millimeters — and even minor deviations can be problematic. The new infrared technology enables accuracy while improving patient experience," he said in statement.

Gilbo said he has wanted to bring this treatment method to Norwalk Hospital since 2019.

"Our goal as physicians is, when we do these treatments, to eliminate the cancer but certainly leave the patient with as little reminder of what they had to go through as possible. Because we just want to get rid of (the cancer" and allow them to go on with their lives as normal as possible," he said.