 The radiation therapy is a common portion of management for cancers. It's about half a cancer patients that end up getting radiation therapy and half of those patients are palliative, meaning we're trying to help with symptom relief and the other half we're a component of cure. Often it can take the place of surgery but sometimes it's after surgery or even before surgery. It can be given by itself or with chemotherapy. It just depends on the nature of the case. Photon-based techniques have been around for years and photons are basically a high energy X-rays and those techniques have gotten very sophisticated over the years and they are still the appropriate treatment modality for a lot of situations. But now our center at the proton center opened in 2016 and we have the most advanced form of proton therapy which is called pencil beam scanning proton therapy or spot scanning proton therapy. Also known as intensity modulated proton therapy and that's been a huge development in our ability to deliver proton therapy precisely and effectively and shape the dose in the manner that it needs to go. So proton therapy is great because it's able to go to a target and there's a total lack of exit dose essentially so it can go somewhere and abruptly stop whereas photons decrease sort of exponentially as they travel through the patient. So protons are good at going to a target such as a tumor and stopping on a dime which can be helpful for avoiding things that don't need to get radiation. So things critical structures that may be in vicinity of a tumor are nicely avoided often with proton therapy. And for me that's really helpful because I treat cancer types that really benefit from proton therapy in my opinion and so they're helpful for head and neck cancers for basically reducing dose to the mouth and a lot of the swallowing apparatus which can lead to less weight loss, less lack of taste, less dry mouth both during treatment and over the long term. This helps people get back to their usual level of functioning quicker than they otherwise would. So people seem to have less work absenteeism and basically we're getting people to their pretreatment level of function a little better with proton therapy. For lung cancer and esophageal cancer we are very good at sparing the heart and often that can be impactful because the heart is very close in proximity to the target a lot of the time and so we have a big emphasis on avoiding the heart and the cardiac substructures which can help avoid a cardiac event years down the line.