BACKGROUND This study aimed to assess the recent changes of radiation therapy (RT) modalities in Korea. In particular, we focused on intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) utilization as the main index, presenting the application status of advanced RT. METHODS We collected information from the Korean Health and Insurance Review and Assessment Service data based on the National Health In...

External radiation beam treatment of cancer tumours involves delivery of invisible radiation beams through the body where internal structures can not be seen. Beam targeting of patient anatomy has to very accurate to achieve the desired therapeutic result. Good understanding of radiotherapy treatment (RT) concepts is essential to training. This paper presents a virtual environment simulator dev...

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 ...

We apply the concept of equivalent uniform dose (EUD) to our data set of model distributions and intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) treatment plans as a method for analyzing large dose inhomogeneities within the tumor volume. For large dose nonuniformities, we find that the linerar-quadratic based EUD model is sensitive to the linear-quadratic model parameters, alpha and beta, making it ne...

An editable rounded leaf offset (RLO) table is provided in the Pinnacle3 treatment planning software. Default tables are provided for major linear accelerator manu- facturers, but it is not clear how the default table values should be adjusted by the user to optimize agreement between the calculated leaf tip value and the actual measured value. Since we wish for the calculated MLC-defined field...

Quantitative radiobiological models can be used to assess the optimum clinical outcome from sophisticated therapeutic modalities by calculating tumor control probability (TCP) and normal tissue complication probability (NTCP). In this study two 3D-CRT and an IMRT treatment plans were developed with an initial prescription dose of 60 Gy in 2 Gy/fraction to prostate. Sensitivity of TCP and Compli...

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the capabilities of DMLC to deliver the respiratory motion-synchronized dynamic IMRT (MS-IMRT) treatments under various dose rates. In order to create MS-IMRT plans, the DMLC leaf motions in dynamic IMRT plans of eight lung patients were synchronized with the respiratory motion of breathing period 4 sec and amplitude 2 cm (peak to peak) using an in-hous...

Over the past few years several automatic and semi-automatic PET segmentation methods for target volume definition in radiotherapy have been proposed. The objective of this study is to compare different methods in terms of dosimetry. For such a comparison, a gold standard is needed. For this purpose, realistic GATE-simulated PET images were used. Three lung cases and three H&N cases were design...

There are many reports concerning patient-specific quality assurance (QA) for intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). However, reports about the statistical results of QA are lacking. Management methods for the results of the QA are needed, even though we have the ESTRO group recommendation that a tolerance limit of 1.96 standard deviation (SD) be established in each institution. The purp...

Under this light, it is worrisome that roughly 80% of patients included in our cohort received this treatment (and were exposed to the risk of treatment-related side-effects) without any benefits in terms of cancer-specific survival at 8-year follow-up [2]. These observations have also profound implications in terms of expenditures for the health care system. Indeed, the adoption of IMRT result...