“Is this radiation?” is usually the second question we hear. The short answer is no, and here's why.
All guidesUnderstanding the technology
Where RFQMR Sits on the Spectrum
Almost everyone asks the same question first, and they are right to ask it: is this radiation? The clearest answer is not a paragraph. It is a picture of where this treatment sits among the things you already know.
The question everyone asks first
The word radiation does a lot of work in everyday speech, and most of it is frightening. For someone with cancer it usually means one thing: radiotherapy, and everything that comes with it.
But radiation, in the physics sense, simply means energy travelling as a wave. The light from a window is radiation. So is the heat from a radiator, the signal reaching your phone, and the broadcast arriving at a car radio. What separates a radio signal from an X-ray is not that one is radiation and the other is not. It is frequency, and the difference in frequency between them is enormous.
The chart below places the Cytotron's operating range on the same scale as everything else. It is the fastest way to understand what this treatment is and is not.
The whole spectrum, on one line
The electromagnetic spectrum, with the treatment range marked
Each step along this scale is ten times the frequency of the one before, which is the only way to fit radio waves and gamma rays onto the same picture. Hover any marker for detail.
The treatment range sits inside the radio band, at the low-frequency end of the entire spectrum. X-rays and gamma rays, the kinds of radiation used in radiotherapy, are more than a billion times higher in frequency.
Two things are worth taking from that picture. The first is distance: the gap between this treatment and an X-ray is not a matter of degree, it is a matter of scale. The second is company. On the stretch of the spectrum the Cytotron works in, its neighbours are radio broadcasts and household electronics, not medical radiation.
What the treatment actually uses
The relevant range for this technology runs from about 1 kilohertz up to 300 megahertz.
To put that in terms you can check yourself: AM radio broadcasts sit at around 1 megahertz, inside that range. FM radio sits at around 100 megahertz, also inside it. The top of the treatment range, 300 megahertz, is still below the frequency your home wifi uses, and well below the 2.45 gigahertz of a kitchen microwave.
The other half of the design is the magnetic field the radio energy is delivered inside, and the fact that the beam is shaped and aimed rather than broadcast. Those are what make it a treatment rather than simply radio waves. But the frequency itself is ordinary, and that is the point of this page.
Familiar points of reference
Frequencies you already live with, in order.
Where the line is actually drawn
There is a real boundary on that spectrum, and it is worth understanding properly rather than taking on trust.
As frequency rises, each packet of energy in the wave carries more punch. Below a certain point, a wave can pass through an atom without disturbing its structure. Above it, the wave carries enough energy to knock an electron clean out of an atom. That is what ionising means, and it is the mechanism by which X-rays and gamma rays damage DNA. It is also why radiotherapy works, and why it has the side effects it has.
That boundary sits in the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, which is far above radio and far above the range this treatment uses. It is the same reason a radio in the kitchen is not a health hazard while sunburn is a real thing: ultraviolet has crossed into the range where it can do structural damage, and radio has not.
Non-ionising means the wave does not carry enough energy to break atoms apart. That is a statement about physics, not a claim about this device. Every radio wave ever broadcast is non-ionising, for the same reason.
One honest complication
Non-ionising does not automatically mean harmless. A microwave oven is non-ionising and it will still cook food, because it delivers a great deal of power at a frequency that water absorbs efficiently. So frequency alone does not settle the safety question; how much power is delivered, and whether it heats tissue, matter too. The Cytotron is described as both non-ionising and non-thermal, meaning it does neither. The trial page covers what was actually observed in patients, which is the part that counts.
Frequency and wavelength, side by side
Every frequency has a matching wavelength, which is simply the physical length of one complete wave. The two are locked together: as frequency goes up, wavelength gets shorter.
This matters for treatment because the size of a wave determines how it behaves when it meets tissue, and the equipment that delivers it has to be built to match. The table below is reproduced from the technical documentation.
Wavelength at each frequency
Calculated as the speed of light divided by the frequency. Rows inside the treatment range are marked.
| Frequency | Wavelength | Where you meet it |
|---|
At 1 hertz a single wave is longer than the diameter of a small planet. At 10 gigahertz it is about three centimetres. The treatment range sits between waves hundreds of kilometres long and waves about a metre long.
What this page settles, and what it doesn't
What it settles. That this treatment does not use X-rays, gamma rays, or anything in the ionising part of the spectrum. That there is no cumulative radiation dose of the kind that limits how much radiotherapy a person can have in a lifetime. And that the frequencies involved are ordinary ones, shared with radio and everyday electronics.
What it does not settle. Whether the treatment will help you. Being in a safe part of the spectrum is a statement about what the technology cannot do to you; it says nothing about what it can do for you. Those are separate questions, answered on separate pages.