No information is currently available regarding pancreatic cancer (PC) pattern of care in Italy. In the present study, a nationwide survey using a questionnaire was performed to enquire the local standards for PC diagnosis and radiotherapy treatment. Fifty-seven percent of 140 Italian centres completed questionnaire. The main causes of no radiotherapy indication were poor general condition (45%...

OBJECTIVE This study was designed to develop and to test a home-based, guided imagery treatment protocol, using audio and video recordings, that is easy for health care professionals and patients to use, is inexpensive, and is applicable to a wide range of health care settings. METHODS Thirty-four children, 6 to 15 years of age, with a physician diagnosis of functional abdominal pain were ass...

Both the planning systems and the form of administering radiotherapy have changed radically since the introduction of 3D planning. At present treatment planning based on computerised axial tomography (CAT) images is standard practice in radiotherapy services. In recent years lineal accelerators for medical use have incorporated technology capable of administering intensity modulated radiation b...

Modern radiotherapy is characterised by a better target definition through medical imaging accompanied by significantly improved radiation delivery methods, most notably Intensity-Modulate Radiation Therapy (IMRT). However, the treatment can only be as accurate as the positioning of patients for their daily radiotherapy fraction. It is in this context that a number of imaging modalities - rangi...

Cancer is a highly lethal disease that mainly treated by image-guided radiotherapy. Because the low dose of cone beam CT less harmful to patients, images are often used for target delineation in radiotherapy various cancers, especially breast and lung cancer. However, breathing heartbeat can cause position errors taken during different periods, also results insufficient imaging clarity, renderi...

BACKGROUND Image-guided radiotherapy used multiple imaging during the radiation therapy course to improve the precision and accuracy of health care provider's treatment. OBJECTIVES This study aims to assess the safety, effectiveness and economic aspects of image-guided radiation therapy for decision-making about this technology in Iran. METHODS In this study, the most important medical data...

Introduction An essential step in radiation therapy is accurate three-dimensional segmentation of the target and organs at risk. Traditionally, this has been done by manual contouring on a slice-by-slice basis, but modern adaptive radiation therapy (ART) protocols can require segmentation of multiple daily images for each patient [1], increasing the pressure to develop automated methods for seg...

Accurate localization of prostate in CT images plays an important role in image guided radiation therapy. However, it has two main challenges. The first challenge is due to the low contrast in CT images. The other challenge is due to the uncertainty of the existence of bowel gas. In this paper, a learning based hierarchical framework is proposed to address these two challenges. The main contrib...

OBJECTIVE The real-time tumor-tracking radiotherapy system with fiducial markers has the advantage that it can be used to verify the localization of the markers during radiation delivery in real-time. We conducted a prospective Phase II study of image-guided local-boost radiotherapy for locally advanced bladder cancer using a real-time tumor-tracking radiotherapy system for positioning, and her...