Neoadjuvant treatment in terms of preoperative radiotherapy reduces local recurrence in rectal cancer, but this improvement has little if any impact on overall survival. Currently performed optimal quality-controlled total mesorectal excision (TME) surgery for patients in the trial setting can be associated with very low local recurrence rates of less than 10% whether the patients receive radio...

Background Preoperative chemoradiotherapy (CRT) has been widely adopted as the standard of care for locally advanced rectal cancer in most western countries. However there has been a general exclusion of the elderly patients from neoadjuvant trials often due to concerns over their tolerance of surgery and/or (chemo)radiotherapy. Our aim was to compare the compliance to preoperative CRT of recta...

Background. Advanced age and immune dysfunction are risk factors for cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) and often render patients with locally-advanced disease medically inoperable or surgically unresectable, but potentially curable with radiotherapy. Concurrent chemotherapy and radiotherapy may not be well tolerated in this population, but another systemic therapy may improve disease con...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to evaluate the survival outcomes and toxicity of postoperative chemoradiotherapy with capecitabine and concurrent intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) or three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (3D-CRT) in patients with stage II and III rectal cancer. PATIENTS We recruited 184 patients with pathologically proven, stage II or III rectal cancer. Followi...

PURPOSE To determine the optimal radiotherapy technique for gastric mucosa-associated lymphoid tissue lymphoma (MALToma), we compared the dosimetric parameters and the risk of solid secondary cancer from scattered doses among anterior-posterior/posterior-anterior parallel-opposed fields (AP/PA), anterior, posterior, right, and left lateral fields (4_field), 3-dimensional conformal radiotherapy ...

Despite the increasing use of the rectal balloon in prostate cancer radiotherapy, many issues still remain to be verified objectively including its positional reproducibility and relevance to treatment morbidity. We have developed a custom rectal balloon that has a scale indicating the depth of insertion and dilates symmetrically ensuring positional reproducibility. Fifty patients with prostate...

Background and objectives: Advanced rectal cancers require local and systemic control. Chemo radiotherapy (CRT) is adequate to achieve adequate local control. Systemic control, however, is a dominant obstacle remained in debates. We compared oncology outcome in both arms in patients with advanced rectal cancers in order to identify high-risk group of distant metastasis. Methods: Data for 723 pa...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study is to investigate the potential to reduce exposure of the contralateral hippocampus in radiotherapy for glioblastoma using volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT). METHODS Datasets of 27 patients who had received 3D conformal radiotherapy (3D-CRT) for glioblastoma with a prescribed dose of 60Gy in fractions of 2Gy were included in this planning study. VMAT...

BACKGROUND To know the effectiveness and tolerance of weekly cisplatin added to radiotherapy (RT) in advanced carcinoma of oropharynx and nasopharynx. PATIENTS AND METHODS Stage II-IV cancer patients were randomly assigned to either radical RT, 70 Gy/35 fractions over 7 weeks (RT arm), or chemoradiotherapy (CRT), cisplatin 40 mg/m² weekly for seven doses plus RT. Primary end points were (i) t...

Several pieces of experimental evidence indicate the following: 1) the most efficient antitumor treatments (this principle applies on both chemotherapy and radiotherapy) are those that induce immunogenic cell death and are able to trigger a specific antitumor immune response; and 2) the immunogenicity of cell death depends very closely on the plasma membrane quantity of calreticulin (CRT), an e...