Management of Uveal Melanoma: Updated Cancer Care Alberta Clinical Practice Guideline.

Objective: The purpose of this guideline update is to reassess and update recommendations in the prior guideline from 2016 on the appropriate management of patients with uveal melanoma.

Methods: In 2021, a multidisciplinary working group from the Provincial Cutaneous Tumour Team, Cancer Care Alberta, Alberta Health Services was convened to update the guideline. A comprehensive review of new research evidence in PubMed as well as new clinical practice guidelines from prominent oncology groups informed the update.

Salvage Low-Dose-Rate Prostate Brachytherapy: Clinical Outcomes of a Phase 2 Trial for Local Recurrence after External Beam Radiation Therapy (NRG Oncology/RTOG 0526).

Purpose: We report efficacy of a prospective phase 2 trial (NCT00450411) of salvage low-dose-rate (LDR) prostate brachytherapy (BT) for local failure (LF) after prior external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) with minimum 5-years' follow-up.

Methods And Materials: Eligible patients had low/intermediate risk prostate cancer (PCa) before EBRT and biopsy-proven LF >30 months after EBRT, with prostate-specific antigen <10 ng/mL and no regional/distant disease. The primary endpoint, late gastrointestinal and genitourinary adverse events (Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events v3.

Clinical Outcomes of the CHIRP Trial: A Phase II Prospective Randomized Trial of Conventionally Fractionated Versus Moderately Hypofractionated Prostate and Pelvic Nodal Radiation Therapy in Patients With High-Risk Prostate Cancer.

Purpose: Hypofractionated radiation therapy (HFRT) may offer treatment advantages for patients with prostate cancer. However, HFRT may also increase the risk of gastrointestinal (GI) or genitourinary (GU) toxicity compared with conventionally fractionated radiation therapy (CFRT). Several large trials have found that HFRT is well tolerated in mixed risk population studies.

Feasibility of performance-based functional assessment in brain tumour survivors.

Introduction: Rehabilitation and exercise interventions are beneficial for the physical and psychological health of cancer survivors. Current clinic-based performance status measures do not accurately capture the survivor's functioning, or rehabilitation and exercise needs. Our primary objective was to explore the feasibility of performing a performance-based functional assessment with brain tumour survivors as a means to inform needs for rehabilitation and exercise.

A Patient-Specific Anisotropic Diffusion Model for Brain Tumour Spread.

Gliomas are primary brain tumours arising from the glial cells of the nervous system. The diffuse nature of spread, coupled with proximity to critical brain structures, makes treatment a challenge. Pathological analysis confirms that the extent of glioma spread exceeds the extent of the grossly visible mass, seen on conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans.

Quantifying I placement accuracy in prostate brachytherapy using postimplant transrectal ultrasound images.

Purpose: The quality of a prostate brachytherapy implant depends on the accurate placement of sources. This study quantifies the misplacement of I sources from the intended location using intraoperative ultrasound images.

Methods And Materials: I sources were manually identified in the postimplant ultrasound images and compared to the preoperative plan.

Moments of von Mises and Fisher distributions and applications.

The von Mises and Fisher distributions are spherical analogues to the Normal distribution on the unit circle and unit sphere, respectively. The computation of their moments, and in particular the second moment, usually involves solving tedious trigonometric integrals. Here we present a new method to compute the moments of spherical distributions, based on the divergence theorem.

Radiation plus Procarbazine, CCNU, and Vincristine in Low-Grade Glioma.

Background: Grade 2 gliomas occur most commonly in young adults and cause progressive neurologic deterioration and premature death. Early results of this trial showed that treatment with procarbazine, lomustine (also called CCNU), and vincristine after radiation therapy at the time of initial diagnosis resulted in longer progression-free survival, but not overall survival, than radiation therapy alone. We now report the long-term results.

Effectiveness of adjuvant temozolomide treatment in patients with glioblastoma.

Objective: To examine whether adjuvant temozolomide treatment improved glioblastoma patients` survival in a large Canadian cohort.

Methods: We retrospectively studied 364 glioblastoma patients who received different modalities of treatment in 2 Canadian tertiary care centers in Edmonton and Halifax, Canada, between January 2000 and December 2006. The primary outcome was survival following the treatment protocol.

Assessment of a commercially available automatic deformable registration system.

In recent years, a number of approaches have been applied to the problem of deformable registration validation. However, the challenge of assessing a commercial deformable registration system - in particular, an automatic registration system in which the deformable transformation is not readily accessible - has not been addressed. Using a collection of novel and established methods, we have developed a comprehensive, four-component protocol for the validation of automatic deformable image registration systems over a range of IGRT applications.

Prostate positioning errors associated with two automatic registration based image guidance strategies.

Daily image guidance for helical tomotherapy prostate patients is based on the registration of pre-treatment megavoltage CT (MVCT) images and the original planning CT. The goal of registration, whether manual or automatic, is the overlap of the prostate; otherwise prostate misplacement may compromise the efficacy of treatment or lead to increased toxicity. A previous study demonstrated that without the aid of implanted fiducials, manual registration results in inaccurate prostate positioning.

Low-dose radiation hypersensitivity is associated with p53-dependent apoptosis.

Exposure to environmental radiation and the application of new clinical modalities, such as radioimmunotherapy, have heightened the need to understand cellular responses to low dose and low-dose rate ionizing radiation. Many tumor cell lines have been observed to exhibit a hypersensitivity to radiation doses <50 cGy, which manifests as a significant deviation from the clonogenic survival response predicted by a linear-quadratic fit to higher doses. However, the underlying processes for this phenomenon remain unclear.