BACKGROUND Interest in MR-only treatment planning for radiation therapy is growing rapidly with the emergence of integrated MRI/linear accelerator technology. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of using synthetic CT images generated from conventional Dixon-based MRI scans for radiation treatment planning of lung cancer. METHODS Eleven patients who underwent whole-body P...

Radiotherapy is one of the main ways head and neck cancers are treated; radiation is used to kill cancerous cells and prevent their recurrence. Complex treatment planning is required to ensure that enough radiation is given to the tumour, and little to other sensitive structures (known as organs at risk) such as the eyes and nerves which might otherwise be damaged. This is especially difficult ...

The increasing incidence of obesity in Poland and its relation to endometrioid endometrial cancer (EEC) is resulting in the increasing necessity of treating obese women. Treatment of an overweight patient with EEC may impede not only the surgical procedures but also radiotherapy, especially external beam radiotherapy (EBRT). The problems arise both during treatment planning and when delivering ...

Highly targeted treatment planning is at the foundation of successful radiotherapy. With its superb and tunable soft-tissue contrast, MRI has in recent years emerged as an imaging modality to drive delineation accuracy of targets and organs at risk. With the introduction of the fi rst commercially available MR-only simulation package, Philips continues to pave the way for the adoption and imple...

This article examines the utility of integrating images from computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) for radiation treatment planning of brain tumors for dose escalation studies. The information obtained from these imaging modalities is complementary to each other and could provide anatomic (through CT and MRI) and metab...

BACKGROUND Peer review, especially prospective peer review, has been supported by professional organizations as an important element in optimal Radiation Oncology practice based on its demonstration of efficacy at detecting and preventing errors prior to patient treatment. Implementation of peer review is not without barriers, but solutions do exist to mitigate or eliminate some of those barrie...

background: radiation-induced lung toxicity is an important dose-limiting toxicity in lung cancer radiotherapy, for which there are no generally accepted predictive factors. this study seeks to identify risk factors associated with the development of severe radiation-induced lung toxicity using clinical and dosimetric parameters. methods: we reviewed the medical records of 54 patients with hist...

Improved outcomes and quality of life of heart failure patients have been reported with the use of left ventricular assist devices (LVADs). However, little information exists regarding devices in patients undergoing radiation cancer treatment. Two HeartWare Ventricular Assist Device (HVAD) pumps were repeatedly irradiated with high intensity 18 MV x-rays to a dosage range of 64-75 Gy at a rate ...

Introduction: Integrated radiation therapy - MRI systems are capable of delivering high doses to the target tissues near sensitive organs and achieve better therapeutic results; however, the Applied magnetic fields for imaging, can influence the charged path, change the penetration depth and deflect the particles, laterally, leading to dose distribution variations. Therefore, i...