BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Conformal radiotherapy has only recently been widely implemented. Although not all aspects have yet been adequately proven, it is generally recognized that maintaining a high degree of precision throughout the process is critical to the treatment outcome while the focus for quality assurance and quality improvement will need to concentrate more on human factors, procedure...

INTRODUCTION We believe that conservative treatment of early breast cancer may not require radiotherapy that encompasses the whole breast. We present here the clinico-pathological basis for this view, as well as a novel therapeutic approach that allows intra-operative radiotherapy to be safely and accurately delivered to the target tissues in a standard operating theatre. THE RATIONALE: Whole-o...

Introduction: In radiation therapy, the accuracy of dose calculations by a treatment planning system (TPS) is important to achieve tumor control and to spare normal tissue. Treatment planning system calculations in the heterogeneous situation may present significant inaccuracies. In this study, three different dose calculation algorithms, pencil beam (PB), collapsed cone (CC), ...

background: delivering the maximum dose to tumor while achieving the minimum dose delivery to normal tissue; is the most important goal in external radiotherapy. diode in vivo dosimetry is widely considered to be an important tool for quality improvement of patient care in external radiotherapy. uncertainty in dose delivery should fall within 5% of the prescribed dose as recommended by internat...

Many lung cancer patients who undergo radiation therapy are treated with higher energy photons (15-18 MV) to obtain deeper penetration and better dose uniformity. However, the longer range of the higher energy recoil electrons in the low-density medium may cause lateral electronic disequilibrium and degrade the target coverage. To compare the dose homogeneity achieved with lower versus higher e...

This study investigated radiation dose variations in pre-clinical irradiation due to the photon beam energy and presence of tissue heterogeneity. Based on the same mouse computed tomography image dataset, three phantoms namely, heterogeneous, homogeneous and bone homogeneous were used. These phantoms were generated by overriding the relative electron density of no voxel (heterogeneous), all vox...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE A comprehensive dosimetry intercomparison has been carried out involving all the radiotherapy centres, all external beam modalities and every radiotherapy treatment unit in the Republic of Ireland. MATERIALS AND METHODS Reference point measurements were made for all megavoltage photon beams. Doses were also investigated in planned three-field distributions. One of these...

Aims: It was aimed to investigate postoperative conformal radiotherapy planning that provides the best target volume and the least dose for critical organs in cancers of stomach. Methods: This study was conducted on the CT simulation images of thirty patients diagnosed with gastric cancer. Target volumes and the organs at risk were contoured. AP-PA reciprocal parallel field conventional plan an...

We calculate and discuss the one-loop corrections to the photon sector of QED interacting to a background gravitational field. At high energies the fermion field can be taken as massless and the quantum terms can be obtained by integrating conformal anomaly. We present a covariant local expression for the corresponding effective action, similar to the one obtained earlier for the gravitational ...