Volumetric imaging and planning for 3-D conformal RT and IMRT have pressured the oncology community to better understand the geometric uncertainties inherent in the RT delivery process, including set-up error (inter-fraction) as well as organ motion during treatment (intra-fraction). This has ushered in the development of emerging technologies and clinical processes collectively referred to as ...

Justification of clinical physics staffing levels is difficult due to the lack of direction as how to equate clinical needs with the staffing levels and competency required. When a physicist negotiates staffing requests to administration, she/he often refers to American College of Radiology staffing level suggestions, and resources such as the Abt studies. This approach is often met with questi...

American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) task group (TG) 142 has recently published a report to update recommendations of the AAPM TG 40 report and add new recommendations concerning medical accelerators in the era of image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT). The recommendations of AAPM TG 142 on IGRT are timely. In our institute, we established a comprehensive imaging QA program on a...

In the era of intensity-modulated radiation therapy, image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT) appears crucial to control dose delivery and to promote dose escalation while allowing healthy tissue sparing. The place of IGRT following radical prostatectomy is poorly described in the literature. This review aims to highlight some key points on the different IGRT techniques applicable to prostatic bed radi...

The challenges of lung cancer radiotherapy are intra/inter-fraction tumor/organ anatomy/motion changes and the need to spare surrounding critical structures. Evolving radiotherapy technologies, such as four-dimensional (4D) image-based motion management, daily on-board imaging and adaptive radiotherapy based on volumetric images over the course of radiotherapy, have enabled us to deliver higher...

Background: The aim of this work was to study the feasibility of constructing a fast thorax model suitable for simulating lung motion due to respiration using only one CT dataset. Materials and Methods: For each of six patients with different thorax sizes, two sets of CT images were obtained in single-breath-hold inhale and exhale stages in the supine position. The CT images were then ...

Adaptive radiotherapy has been introduced to manage an individual's treatment by, including patient-specific treatment variation identified and quantified during the course of radiotherapy in the treatment planning and delivering optimization. Early studies have demonstrated that this technique could significantly improve the therapeutic ratio by safely reducing the large target margin that has...

Statistical Image Reconstruction and Motion Estimation for Image-Guided Radiotherapy by Yong Long Co-Chairs: Jeffrey A. Fessler and James M. Balter Image reconstruction and motion estimation are very important for image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT). Three-dimensional reconstruction of patient anatomy using X-ray computed tomography (CT) allows identification of the location of a tumor prior to tr...

Imaging has been integral to radiotherapy for decades. However, it has been within the last 20 years that phrases such as ‘image guidance’ have become part of mainstream radiotherapy vocabulary, and the use of all available imaging modalities within radiotherapy more common. So what is meant by ‘image guidance in radiotherapy’? This was one of the questions that the National Radiotherapy Implem...

This paper presents an efficient image compression approach based on JPEG image compression. JPEG is the most frequently applied image compression technique in today‟s world. We have developed an application based on VB.NET for converting and compressing images in JPEG format. Using this application we finally propose a relation between image quality with the amount of image compression.