Computational Tracking of Tumor - Can the CAT catch the Mouse

More than half of all solid tumors receive external beam ionizing radiation as part of multimodality treatment. The goal of radiation treatment is to treat disease while avoiding normal tissue toxicity. In many sites, dose escalation has been shown to offer local tumor control benefits. This has often been reported in the literature addressing irradiation of lung tumors. Lung cancer is the second most common cancer in both men and women in the United States, and people with lung cancer tend not to live long after diagnosis. Its radiation treatment therefore attracts great attention. Due to the spatial relationship of lung tumors with important normal tissue structures – spinal cord, esophagus, heart, brachial plexus, normal lung parenchyma, bronchial tree, and trachea among others – dose escalation is often not feasible to a great extent. Furthermore, radiation treatment planning for lung cancers is often complicated by complex motion of tumors during all phases of the respiratory cycle. This tumor motion and object deformity is also heavily influenced by the motion of intrathoracic normal tissue structures. Hence, for a number of reasons, treatment planning for intrathoracic radiation requires better tools to optimize precision and accuracy of delivery.