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IMRT treatment planning with commercial treatment planning systems is a trial-and-error process, based on a series of subjective human decisions. Therefore the quality of the IMRT treatment plans may not be consistent among patients, planners or institutions with different experience. Different plan quality assurance (QA) models have been proposed recently, that could flag suboptimal plans that...

The use of image-based 3D treatment planning has significantly increased the complexity of commercially available treatment-planning systems (TPSs). Medical physicists have traditionally focused their efforts on understanding the calculation algorithm; this is no longer possible. A quality assurance (QA) program for our 3D treatment-planning system (ADAC Pinnacle3) is presented. The program is ...

Despite its theoretical appeal, integrated care remains a new frontier for health and social care systems in many countries. A key motivation for increasing the integration of a range of health care services with socialor community-based services is the imperative to improve the patient experience, particularly for individuals with ongoing multiple and complex health care and functional needs. ...

Treatment planning in radiosurgery and radiation therapy involves a large number of medical and technical constraints. The main technical constraints stem from the gantry kinematics and the type of collimator available. The gantry kinematics (i.e. number and spatial arrangement of movable joint axes) determines the type of motion which can be performed by the therapeutic beam. The collimator de...

The Fogarty balloon catheter is a useful adjunct in removing aspirated foreign bodies, but its use is not without risks. A case is presented of Fogarty catheter disruption while attempting to remove a foreign body. The resulting debris in the distal airway was inaccessible to bronchoscopic retrieval. An effective treatment plan is outlined to deal with this problem.

Background It is becoming increasingly common for pedobarography to be used to aid treatment planning. While there is some consensus on use of this data in specific populations (for example diabetes in adults) there is little information on how it should be interpreted in those with paediatric orthopaedic conditions, such as clubfoot. This is due in part to a scarcity in the literature of “norm...

We use robust optimization techniques to formulate an IMRT treatment planning problem in which the dose matrices are uncertain, due to both dose calculation errors and interfraction positional uncertainty of tumour and organs. When the uncertainty is taken into account, the original linear programming formulation becomes a second-order cone program. We describe a novel and efficient approach fo...

THIS ARTICLE MAY BE REPRODUCED OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE PUBLISHER. 45 One of the most popular self-help books in the United States today is The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey.1 In this best seller, Covey presents a principle-centered approach for solving personal and professional problems. One of his admonitions is to “begin wit...