Radiotherapy Treatment Planning, Chapman, J. Donald , Nahum, Alan E.

The first section of the book discusses the statistics of pediatric cancer incidence and survival. It also reviews the literature on radiation-induced secondary malignancies, addressing the use of intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) in children.

The second section presents disease-specific chapters. Each chapter in this section gives a clinical overview of the disease, describes treatment planning and delivery concepts and guidance, and surveys late effects and organ tolerance doses. Many of the techniques presented can be readily translated to any radiotherapy department. The book also explores the historical background underpinning current treatment paradigms, which reveals the tremendous creativity of radiation oncologists and physicists in addressing difficult treatment dilemmas.

Medical physicists, dosimetrists, radiation oncologists, and others in a pediatric radiotherapy team must understand pediatric cancers and know how to accurately and safely implement optimal treatments to minimize late effects and maximize the chance for cure or palliation. The methods and clinical background in this book help these health care providers--even those with no formal training in pediatric radiotherapy--recognize the differences between pediatric cancers and adult cancers and then design and administer an appropriate treatment plan.

In the field of radiobiology, the linear-quadratic (LQ) equation has become the standard for defining radiation-induced cell killing. Radiotherapy Treatment Planning: Linear-Quadratic Radiobiology describes tumor cell inactivation from a radiation physics perspective and offers appropriate LQ parameters for modeling tumor and normal tissue responses.

Explore the Latest Cell Killing Numbers for Defining Iso-Effective Cancer Treatments

The book compiles radiation mechanism information from biophysical publications of the past 50 years, addressing how ionizing radiation produces the killing of stem cells in human tumors. It presents several physical and chemical parameters that can modulate the radiation response of clonogenic cells in tumors. The authors describe the use of the LQ model in basic radiation mechanism studies with cells of relatively homogeneous radiation response and then extend the model to the fitting of survival data generated with heterogeneous cell populations (tumors). They briefly discuss how to use the LQ model for predicting tumor (local) control probability (TCP) and normal tissue complication probability (NTCP). The book also examines potential molecular targets related to alpha- and beta-inactivation and gives suggestions for further molecular characterizations of these two independent processes.

Develop Efficacious, Patient-Friendly Treatments at Reduced Costs

Focusing on quantitative radiobiology in LQ formulation, this book assists medical physicists and radiation oncologists in identifying improved cancer treatments. It also encourages investigators to translate potentially improved radiotherapy schedules based on TCP and NTCP modeling into actual patient benefit.