The advantage of 3D conformal treatment of lumbar spine metastases in comparison to traditional PA or AP-PA techniques: restoring an intermediate niche of therapeutic sophistication.

Background: To evaluate the effect of the 3D radiation field design on normal tissues compared with commonly used appositional fields in patients with lumbar spine metastases.

Methods And Materials: Ten comparative treatment plans for radiation of lumbar spine metastases were compared for posterior and anterior- posterior fields with 3D plans.

Results: The PTV coverage in all comparative plans was similar.

AP-PA field orientation followed by IMRT reduces lung exposure in comparison to conventional 3D conformal and sole IMRT in centrally located lung tumors.

Little attention has been paid to the fact that intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) techniques do not easily enable treatment with opposed beams. Three treatment plans (3 D conformal, IMRT, and combined (anterior-posterior-posterio-anterior (AP-PA) + IMRT) of 7 patients with centrally-located lung cancer were compared for exposure of lung, spinal cord and esophagus. Combined IMRT and AP-PA techniques offer better lung tissue sparing compared to plans predicated solely on IMRT for centrally-located lung tumors.

Multiscale 3D shape representation and segmentation with applications to hippocampal/caudate extraction from brain MRI.

Extracting structure of interest from medical images is an important yet tedious work. Due to the image quality, the shape knowledge is widely used for assisting and constraining the segmentation process. In many previous works, shape knowledge was incorporated by first constructing a shape space from training cases, and then constraining the segmentation process to be within the learned shape space.

Improved treatment of the breast and supraclavicular fossa based on a simple geometrical principle.

In breast cancer, nodal irradiation has become routine, but adds time and creates concerns for field overlap if the "match" is not accurate. We developed a technique to address these issues by using only one isocenter for both areas. Tangents are designed at simulation.

Tracking accuracy of a real-time fiducial tracking system for patient positioning and monitoring in radiation therapy.

Purpose: In radiation therapy there is a need to accurately know the location of the target in real time. A novel radioactive tracking technology has been developed to answer this need. The technology consists of a radioactive implanted fiducial marker designed to minimize migration and a linac mounted tracking device.