During the past half century, an ongoing technological revolution in cancer imaging and radiation treatment has taken us ever closer to the goal of treating localized tumors without harming normal tissues. In his visionary 1946 paper, Harvard physicist Robert Wilson suggested that energetic protons could provide a nearly ideal form of radiotherapy. What makes protons the preferred particle type...

BACKGROUND The standard of care for locally advanced anal cancer has been concurrent chemoradiation. However, conventional treatment with 3-dimensional radiotherapy is associated with significant toxicity. The feasibility of new radiotherapy techniques such as image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT) in combination with chemotherapy for the treatment of this malignancy was assessed. PATIENTS AND METH...

Image-guided tumor ablation for lung malignancies has emerged as a treatment modality for medically inoperable patients. Overall, image-guided lung tumor ablation is a minimally invasive procedure that has an acceptable safety profile and less impact on lung function. This is important for patients with poor pulmonary and/or cardiac functions or with multiple comorbidities, which prevent them f...

In external beam radiotherapy, modern technologies for dynamic dose delivery and beam conformation provide high selectivity in radiation dose administration to the pathological volume. A comparable accuracy level is needed in the 3-D localization of tumor and organs at risk (OARs), in order to accomplish the planned dose distribution in the reality of each irradiation session. In-room imaging t...

PURPOSE We focused the attention on radiation therapy practices about the gynecological malignancies in Piedmont, Liguria, and Valle d'Aosta to know the current treatment practice and to improve the quality of care. MATERIAL AND METHODS We proposed a cognitive survey to evaluate the standard practice patterns for gynecological cancer management, adopted from 2012 to 2014 by radiotherapy (RT) ...

The image-guided radiotherapy technique (IGRT) makes use of imaging devices to verify the positions of the target volume and organs at risk during the treatment sessions. In this work we evaluate the image quality provided by an imaging system based on a kilovoltage cone-beam CT, and explore its ability to perform IGRT and adaptive radiotherapy. We analyze the accuracy of the image slice width,...

Targeted radiation therapy (RT) is a central component of cancer treatment in both the radical and palliative settings. A central and compelling feature of RT is its capacity to deliver a therapeutic effect for cancerous targets that lie deep within the body. Full exploitation of this effect has been limited by the clinical uncertainties in identifying the geometric boundaries of the target and...

BACKGROUND In recent years, MR images have been increasingly used in therapeutic applications such as image-guided radiotherapy (IGRT). However, images with low contrast values and noises present challenges for image segmentation. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to develop a robust method based on fuzzy C-means (FCM) method which can segment MR images polluted with Gaussian noise. ...