Email:[email protected] Prostate cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer among males in the United States.1 The treatment of prostate cancer has several options, including external beam radiation therapy. The primary goal of radiation therapy is to control the tumor by delivering a maximum dose to the tumor site, yet minimizing the radiation dose to normal tissues. The development of...

Carbon fiber is commonly used in radiation therapy for treatment tabletops and various immobilization and support devices, partially because it is generally perceived to be almost radiotransparent to high-energy photons. To avoid exposure to normal tissue during modern radiation therapy, one must deliver the radiation from all gantry angles; hence, beams often transit the couch proximal to the ...

The Canadian Organization of Medical Physicists (COMP), in close partnership with the Canadian Partnership for Quality Radiotherapy (CPQR) has developed a series of Technical Quality Control (TQC) guidelines for radiation treatment equipment. These guidelines outline the performance objectives that equipment should meet in order to ensure an acceptable level of radiation treatment quality. The ...

Positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT), which combines the advantages of high sensitivity and specificity of PET and high resolution of CT, is a unique tool for cancer management. PET/CT has been widely used in cancer diagnosis and treatment. The article reviews the recent applications of PET/CT in radiation oncology, with a focus on (18)F-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG)-PET/CT, a...

Although well described in the 1960s, liver toxicity secondary to radiation therapy, commonly known as radiation-induced liver disease (RILD), remains a major challenge. RILD encompasses two distinct clinical entities, a 'classic' form, composed of anicteric hepatomegaly, ascites and elevated alkaline phosphatase; and a 'non-classic' form, with liver transaminases elevated to more than five tim...

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 seco...