The maximum tolerated dose of conformal radiation therapy delivered at 1.6 Gy bid is being assessed in patients with unresectable stage IIB-IIIB non-small cell lung cancer who have been treated with induction regimens consisting of carboplatin plus paclitaxel or carboplatin plus vinorelbine. Data from the early stages of this parallel phase I study show that the two induction regimens are simil...

Quantitative radiobiological models can be used to assess the optimum clinical outcome from sophisticated therapeutic modalities by calculating tumor control probability (TCP) and normal tissue complication probability (NTCP). In this study two 3D-CRT and an IMRT treatment plans were developed with an initial prescription dose of 60 Gy in 2 Gy/fraction to prostate. Sensitivity of TCP and Compli...

Under this light, it is worrisome that roughly 80% of patients included in our cohort received this treatment (and were exposed to the risk of treatment-related side-effects) without any benefits in terms of cancer-specific survival at 8-year follow-up [2]. These observations have also profound implications in terms of expenditures for the health care system. Indeed, the adoption of IMRT result...

We have designed a toolbox that provides an environment for testing radiotherapy optimization techniques, objective functions, and constraints. A set of three-dimensional (3D) pencil beam dose distributions have been computed for a cylindrical phantom. The 6 MV pencil beams were computed using a superposition-based dose engine commissioned for an Elekta SL20 linear accelerator. Due to the cylin...

In recent years, radiotherapy for liver cancer has accomplished much technical progress. The history of radiotherapy for liver cancer shows an endeavor to overcome the problem of how to raise the irradiation dose to lesions while suppressing the unnecessary irradiation dose to normal liver tissue. With the appearance of treatment using X-ray radiotherapy represented by three-dimensional conform...

Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy (IMRT) is the standard of care in the treatment of head and neck squamous cell carcinomas (HNSCC) based on level 1 evidence. Technical advances in radiotherapy have revolutionized the treatment of HNSCC, with the most tangible gain being a reduction in long term morbidity. However, these benefits come with a serious and sobering price. Today, there is a greater ...

BACKGROUND/AIMS To review the long-term results of treatment of optic nerve sheath meningiomas (ONSMs) with conformal radiotherapy. METHODS Eleven patients with presumed ONSM were treated with fractionated conformal radiotherapy using 45-54 Gy in 25-30 fractions and followed for more than 5 years. Affected eye visual acuity in logMAR notation, colour vision, threshold perimetry, mean deviation ...

Volumetric-modulated arc radiotherapy (VMAT) is an iteration of intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), both of which deliver highly conformal dose distributions. Studies have shown the superiority of VMAT and IMRT in comparison with 3-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (3D-CRT) in planning target volume (PTV) coverage and organs-at-risk (OARs) sparing. This is the first study examining the be...

Pediatric nasopharyngeal carcinoma, also referred to as cavum carcinoma, is a rare pediatric disease with an infrequent incidence rate. We present the case of a pediatric patient with nasopharyngeal cancer who received an adult schedule of concomitant chemotherapy and conformal radiotherapy with a brachytherapy boost. Adult protocols with high radiotherapy doses are not commonly used in pediatr...

Intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) has become an effective tool for cancer treatment with radiation. However, even expert radiation planners still need to spend a substantial amount of time manually adjusting IMRT optimization parameters such as dose limits and costlet weights in order to obtain a clinically acceptable plan. In this paper, we describe two main advances that simplify the pa...