Radiotherapy is a localised treatment. The definition of tumour and target volumes for radiotherapy is vital to its successful execution. This requires the best possible characterisation of the location and extent of tumour. Diagnostic imaging, including help and advice from diagnostic specialists, is therefore essential for radiotherapy planning. There are three main volumes in radiotherapy pl...

By adapting to the actual patient anatomy during treatment, tracked multi-leaf collimator (MLC) treatment deliveries offer an opportunity for margin reduction and healthy tissue sparing. This is assumed to be especially relevant for hypofractionated protocols in which intrafractional motion does not easily average out. In order to confidently deliver tracked treatments with potentially reduced ...

BACKGROUND Reproducibility of different immobilization systems, which may affect set-up errors, remains uncertain. Immobilization systems and their corresponding set-up errors influence the clinical target volume to planning target volume (CTV-PTV) margins and thus may result in undesirable treatment outcomes. This study compared the reproducibility of patient positioning with Hipfix system and...

The aim of this work was to quantify the ability to predict intrafraction diaphragm motion from an external respiration signal during a course of radiotherapy. The data obtained included diaphragm motion traces from 63 fluoroscopic lung procedures for 5 patients, acquired simultaneously with respiratory motion signals (an infrared camera-based system was used to track abdominal wall motion). Du...

The prediction as well as the gating of respiratory motion have received much attention over the last two decades for reducing the targeting error of the radiation treatment beam due to respiratory motion. In this article, we present a real-time algorithm for predicting respiratory motion in 3D space and realizing a gating function without pre-specifying a particular phase of the patient's brea...

INTRODUCTION To evaluate in-field megavoltage (MV) imaging of simultaneously integrated boost (SIB) breast fields to determine its feasibility in treatment verification for the SIB breast radiotherapy technique, and to assess whether the current-imaging protocol and treatment margins are sufficient. METHODS For nine patients undergoing SIB breast radiotherapy, in-field MV images of the SIB fi...

Dosimetric consequences of positional shifts were studied using frameless Brainlab ExacTrac X-ray system for hypofractionated (3 or 5 fractions) intracranial stereo-tactic radiotherapy (SRT). SRT treatments of 17 patients with metastatic intracranial tumors using the stereotactic system were retrospectively investigated. The treatments were simulated in a treatment planning system by modifying ...

The Gaussian error function model, containing pairs of error and complementary error functions, was used to carry out cumulative dose-volume histogram (cDVH) analysis on prostate intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) plans with interfraction prostate motion. Cumulative DVHs for clinical target volumes (CTVs) shifted in the anterior-posterior directions based on a 7-beam IMRT plan were ca...