PURPOSE To evaluate the feasibility of using helical tomotherapy for locally advanced left-sided breast cancer. METHODS AND MATERIALS Treatment plans were generated for 10 left-sided breast cancer patients with positive lymph nodes comparing a multiport breast (three-dimensional) technique with the tomotherapy treatment planning system. The planning target volumes, including the chest wall/br...

An accurate means of determining and correcting for daily patient setup errors is important to the cancer outcome in radiotherapy. While many tools have been developed to detect setup errors, difficulty may arise in accurately adjusting the patient to account for the rotational error components. A novel, automated method to correct for rotational patient setup errors in helical tomotherapy is p...

Tomotherapy is an image-guided, intensity-modulated radiation therapy system that delivers highly conformal dose distributions in a helical fashion. This system is also capable of acquiring megavoltage computed-tomography images and registering them to the planning kVCT images for accurate target localization. Quality assurance (QA) of this device is time intensive, but can be expedited by impr...

AIM To investigate the impact of tomotherapy on the dose delivered to the lungs and other normal tissues. MATERIAL AND METHODS From February 2008 to May 2009, 35 patients with stage IIIA/IIIB non-small cell lung cancer were treated with helical tomotherapy at the S. Camillo-Forlanini Hospital. For our study we selected 20 patients who underwent chemotherapy followed by sequential radiotherapy...

BACKGROUND The purpose of this study was to evaluate clinical outcomes of conventional fractionated helical tomotherapy in patients with small to medium hepatocellular carcinomas (HCCs) without portal vein tumor thrombosis. METHODS Patients with up to four HCC lesions not treatable by surgery or percutaneous ablative therapies, <10 cm in the longest diameter, and no evidence of major vascular...

Helical tomotherapy is a rotational delivery technique that uses intensity-modulated fan beams to deliver highly conformal intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). The beam-on time needed to deliver a given prescribed dose can be up to 15 times longer than that needed using conventional treatment delivery. As such, there is concern that this delivery technique has the potential to increase...

BACKGROUND Helical tomotherapy, an advanced intensity-modulated radiation therapy with integrated CT imaging, permits highly conformal irradiation with sparing of normal tissue. Capecitabine, a pro-drug of 5-FU that induces thymidine phosphorylase can achieve higher levels of intracellular 5-FU when administered concurrently with radiation. We evaluated the feasibility as well as the clinical o...