Radiotherapy has a well-established role in the management of head and neck cancers. Over the past decade, a variety of new imaging modalities have been incorporated into the radiotherapy planning and delivery process. These technologies are collectively referred to as image-guided radiotherapy and may lead to significant gains in tumor control and radiation side effect profiles. In the followi...

Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Radiotherapy is one of the main treatment modalities of lung cancer. However, the achievable accuracy of radiotherapy treatment is limited for lung-based tumors due to respiratory motion. Four-dimensional (4D) radiotherapy explicitly accounts for anatomic motion by characterizing the motion, creating a treatment plan that acco...

Volumetric imaging and planning for 3-dimensional (3D) conformal radiotherapy and intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) have highlighted the need to the oncology community to better understand the geometric uncertainties inherent in the radiotherapy delivery process, including setup error (interfraction) as well as organ motion during treatment (intrafraction). This has ushered in the develop...

INTRODUCTION Medical imaging provides information for diagnosis and staging, evaluation of treatment response, and also plays pivotal role in advanced radiotherapy treatment planning. In the era of the innovative conventional and functional imaging techniques, the main goal of radiation therapy, which is to maximize the dose to the target while minimizing the dose to adjacent healthy organs, ca...

Background: The magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based radiotherapy planning method have been considered in recent years because of the advantages of MRI and the problems of planning with two images modality. The first step in MRI-based radiotherapy is to evaluate magnetic resonance (MR) images geometric distortion. Therefore, the present study aimed to evaluate system related geometric distort...

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 ...

Conventional radiotherapy for cervical cancer relies on clinical examination, 3-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (3D-CRT), and 2-dimensional intracavitary brachytherapy. Excellent local control and survival have been obtained for small early stage cervical cancer with definitive radiotherapy. For bulky and locally advanced disease, the addition of chemotherapy has improved the prognosis but t...

ABSTRACTIntracranial tumours often require radiotherapeutic approaches that differ from other sites. Their specific requirements merit a specialized discussion. A brief review of radiotherapy techniques to treat intracranial tumours is presented with emphasis on the author’s own experience and work, where appropriate. A clinical introduction is presented first followed by a description of bot...

Introduction: The close proximity of the rectum tissue to the prostate gland results in rectal toxicity during prostate radiotherapy. Rectal Retractor (RR) is a rectal displacement technique that inserts into the rectum, as a result, the lateral and dorsal part of the rectal wall push away from high dose areas. The aim of this study was to investigate the dosimetric consequence...

The use of functional imaging in radiotherapy treatment (RT) planning requires accurate co-registration of functional imaging scans to CT scans. We evaluated six methods of image registration for use in SPECT-guided radiotherapy treatment planning. Methods varied in complexity from 3D affine transform based on control points to diffeomorphic demons and level set non-rigid registration. Ten lung...