Introduction: Computerized treatment planning is a rapidly evolving modality that depends on hardware and software efficiency. Despite ICRU recommendations suggesting 5% deviation in dose delivery the overall uncertainty shall be less than 3.5% as suggested by B.J. Minjnheer. J. In house spreadsheets are developed by the medical physicists to cross-verify the dose calculated by the Treatment Pl...

This discussion paper will explore the impact of using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in the treatment of cervical cancer with brachytherapy. It is written from the perspective of current departmental practice in the UK and aims to highlight the issues associated with using MRI as a tool for image guided brachytherapy planning. To support the discussion, a literature review was undertaken foc...

Introduction: The accuracy of the patient setup and tumor location are major factors that determine the efficacy of radiotherapy treatment planning. In the prostate radiotherapy, reproducibility of the prostate location for each treatment fraction is problematic owing to varying filling of the rectum and bladder. According to this, the aim of this study was to measure the inte...

In the first group of developments, we reference the introduction of morphological, functional, and molecular imaging in all the steps of oncology workflow, from treatment planning to treatment delivery phases. Treatment plans based on multimodality images and daily imageguided radiotherapy (IGRT), based on volumetric images, are both becoming routine. Advanced examples of this trend are combin...

In the past 5 yrs, positron emission tomography (PET), usually used with 18F-fluoro-2-deoxy-glucose (FDG), has become an important imaging modality in lung cancer patients. Currently, the use of FDG-PET in respiratory oncology is mainly for diagnosis and staging. Standard indications are the evaluation of an indeterminate solitary pulmonary nodule or mass, where FDG-PET has proven to be signifi...

BACKGROUND In the present work we compared the spatial uncertainties associated with a MR-based workflow for external radiotherapy of prostate cancer to a standard CT-based workflow. The MR-based workflow relies on target definition and patient positioning based on MR imaging. A solution for patient transport between the MR scanner and the treatment units has been developed. For the CT-based wo...

radical resection of a pathological lesion along with the preservation of eloquent cerebral tissue is the principle goal of neurosurgery. brain lesions are usually diagnosed by conventional magnetic resonance imaging (mri), but this method is unable to describe the relationship between lesions and neighboring specific white matter (wm) tracts. diffusion tensor tractograghy (dtt) is a new sophis...

background: it was intended to investigate the effect of physical wedge (pw) and enhanced dynamic wedges (edw) on contralateral breast dose during primary breast irradiation in radiotherapy treatment, using high energy photon beams. materials and methods: the varian’s clinac dual mode linear accelerator model 2100 c/d and siemen’s primus accelerators were used for radiation doses with 6 mv and ...

Four-dimensional (4D) radiotherapy is the explicit inclusion of the temporal changes in anatomy during the imaging, planning, and delivery of radiotherapy. Temporal anatomic changes can occur for many reasons, though the focus of the current investigation is respiration motion for lung tumors. The aim of this study was to develop 4D radiotherapy treatment-planning methodology for DMLC-based res...

In this work we present a novel treatment planning technique called interactive dose shaping (IDS) to be employed for the optimization of intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). IDS does not rely on a Newton-based optimization algorithm which is driven by an objective function formed of dose volume constraints on pre-segmented volumes of interest (VOIs). Our new planning technique allows ...