Modern radiotherapy techniques heavily rely on high-quality medical imaging. PET provides biologic information about the tumor, complementary to anatomic imaging. Integrated PET/CT has found its way into the practice of radiation oncology, and (18)F-FDG PET is being introduced for radiotherapy planning. The functional information possibly augments accurate delineation and treatment of the tumor...

PURPOSE The role of fusion imaging methods SPECT-CT and PET-CT is currently being investigated in radiotherapy (RT) treatment planning. SPECT and PET provide extra information for gross tumor volume (GTV) delineation. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the role of SPECT-CT in RT. METHODS SPECT-CT studies were performed in 55 patients with (99m)Tc-MIBI/Tetrofosmin (TF), with 99mTc-Nanoc...

In radiation therapy planning, uncertainties in target volume definition yield a risk of underdosing the tumor. The classical way to prevent this in the context of external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) has been to expand the clinical target volume (CTV) with an isotropic margin to obtain the planning target volume (PTV). However, the EBRT-based PTV concept is not directly applicable to brachytherap...

Cancer is one of the most common causes of death. Worldwide about 14 million new cancer cases and 8.2 million cancer deaths were reported for 2012 [1]. Even though minimally invasive treatment methods like radiofrequency ablation (RFA) become more and more popular, chemotherapy remains an important systemic treatment method, especially for metastatic cancer. An important criterion for assessing...

BACKGROUND Diffusion imaging tractography is increasingly used to trace critical fiber tracts in brain tumor patients to reduce the risk of post-operative neurological deficit. However, the effects of peritumoral edema pose a challenge to conventional tractography using the standard diffusion tensor model. The aim of this study was to present a novel technique using a two-tensor unscented Kalma...

In radiotherapy of gliomas, a precise definition of the treatment volume is problematic, because current imaging modalities reveal only the central part of the tumor with a high cellular density, but fail to detect all regions of microscopic tumor cell spread in the adjacent brain parenchyma. Mathematical models can be used to integrate known growth characteristics of gliomas into the target de...

OBJECT Fluorescence imaging has the potential to significantly improve neurosurgical resection of oncologic lesions through improved differentiation between normal and cancerous tissue at the tumor margins. In order to successfully mark glioma tissue a fluorescent tracer must have the ability to penetrate through the blood brain barrier (BBB) and provide delineation in the tumor periphery where...

Introduction: Planning target volume (PTV) is generated from internal treatment volume (ITV) using four-dimensional computed tomography (4D-CT) for enhanced therapeutic gain in the stereotactic body radiotherapy for lung lesions (SBRT-Lung). This study aimed to propose a strategy to generate ITV on multiple-phase 3D-CT and enhance therapeutic gain in SBRT-Lung. <stron...