ASSESSMENT OF PET/CT USE IN RADIOTHERAPY PLANNING VERSUS CT SCANS USE ONLY

PETCT in radiotherapy treatment planning

The use of PETCT in Hodgkin’s lymphoma

Background Lymphoma is a haematological malignancy that affects both old and young. It is the most common indication for PETCT in the young adult. Lymphoma is the fifth commonest malignancy in the UK after breast, lung, colorectal and prostate cancer, accounting for 11,861 cancer cases in 2008 (4%). The current conventional treatments provide good cure rates, with overall 10-year survival rates...

The use of PET/CT in radiotherapy planning: contribution of deformable registration

INTRODUCTION Medical imaging provides information for diagnosis and staging, evaluation of treatment response, and also plays pivotal role in advanced radiotherapy treatment planning. In the era of the innovative conventional and functional imaging techniques, the main goal of radiation therapy, which is to maximize the dose to the target while minimizing the dose to adjacent healthy organs, ca...

Multi-atlas-based Segmentation of Pelvic Structures from Ct Scans for Planning in Prostate Cancer Radiotherapy

In prostate cancer radiotherapy, the accurate identification of the prostate and organs at risk in planning computer tomography (CT) images is an important part of the therapy planning and optimization. Manually contouring these organs can be a time consuming process and subject to intraand inter-expert variability. Automatic identification of organ boundaries from these images is challenging d...

A criterion for the reliable use of MRI-only radiotherapy

BACKGROUND MRI-only radiotherapy will eliminate the systematic registration errors introduced when transferring MRI information to the CT. However, challenges concerning the missing information on electron density, necessary for dose calculation and patient setup on bony anatomy are introduced. This study presents a possible statistical approach to evaluate, if deviations based on MRI-only radi...