Radiotherapy treatment outcome models are a complicated function of treatment, clinical and biological factors. Our objective is to provide clinicians and scientists with an accurate, flexible and user-friendly software tool to explore radiotherapy outcomes data and build statistical tumour control or normal tissue complications models. The software tool, called the dose response explorer syste...

Background: Modern radiotherapy requires accurate contouring which may suffer in the postsurgical setting. We estimated post-prostatectomy interand intra-rater contouring reliability and assessed the effect on bladder and rectal normal tissue complication probability (NTCP). Methods: Four physicians each contoured two different treatment plans, separated by at least seven days, on 15 patients r...

Introduction: Radiation therapy is the main treatment method for head and neck cancers, which comprise 3–5% of all cancers. A major side effect of this treatment is complication of the parotid glands, i.e. xerostomia, which occurs at relatively low doses. This complication leads to mouth dryness which is the most common problem for head and neck cancer survivors. There are dif...

An overview of radiotherapy (RT) induced normal tissue complication probability (NTCP) models is presented. NTCP models based on empirical and mechanistic approaches that describe a specific radiation induced late effect proposed over time for conventional RT are reviewed with particular emphasis on their basic assumptions and related mathematical translation and their weak and strong points.

The comparison of the pencil beam dose calculation algorithm with modified Batho heterogeneity correction (PBC-MB) and the analytical anisotropic algorithm (AAA) and the mutual comparison of advanced dose calculation algorithms used in breast radiotherapy have focused on the differences between the physical dose distributions. Studies on the radiobiological impact of the algorithm (both on the ...

Background and purposeHead neck cancer (HNC) patients treated with radiotherapy often suffer from radiation-induced toxicities. Normal Tissue Complication Probability (NTCP) modeling can be used to determine the probability develop these toxicities based on patient, tumor, treatment dose characteristics. Since currently NTCP models are developed using supervised methods that discard unlabeled p...

PURPOSE To evaluate the linear quadratic (LQ) model for hypofractionated radiotherapy within the context of predicting radiation pneumonitis (RP) and to investigate the effect if a linear (L) model in the high region (LQL model) is used. METHODS AND MATERIALS The radiation doses used for 128 patients treated with hypofractionated radiotherapy were converted to the equivalent doses given in fr...

Modern radiotherapy technologies such as proton beam therapy (PBT) permit dose escalation to the tumour and minimize unnecessary doses to normal tissues. To achieve appropriate patient selection for PBT, a normal tissue complication probability (NTCP) model can be applied to estimate the risk of treatment-related toxicity relative to X-ray therapy (XRT). A methodology for estimating the differe...

Radiotherapy is one of the treatment options for locally advanced prostate cancer; however, with standard radiation doses, it is not always very effective. One of the strategies to improve the efficiency of radiotherapy is increasing the dose. In this study, to increase tumor local control rates, a new radiotherapy method, known as dose painting (DP), was investigated. To compare 3-dimensional ...

BACKGROUND To make a radiobiological comparison, for high risk prostate cancer (T3a, PSA > 20 ng/ml or Gleason > 7) of two radiotherapy treatment techniques. One technique consists of a treatment in three phases of the pelvic nodes, vesicles and prostate using a conventional fractionation scheme of 2 Gy/fraction (SIMRT). The other technique consists of a treatment in two phases that gives simul...