Leptomeningeal metastasis from prostate cancer.

Aims And Background: Metastatic prostate carcinoma commonly involves bones and extrapelvic lymph nodes, with occasional visceral deposits. Central nervous system involvement is unusual and particularly the occurrence of leptomeningeal metastasis (LM) is extremely rare, with few cases described in the medical literature. The clinical presentation is characterized by multifocal neurological deficit and the prognosis is generally dismal, with survival ranging between 3 and 6 months.

Head and neck region consolidation radiotherapy and prophylactic cranial irradiation with hippocampal avoidance delivered with helical tomotherapy after induction chemotherapy for non-sinonasal neuroendocrine carcinoma of the upper airways.

Background: Non-sinonasal neuroendocrine carcinomas (NSNECs) of the head and neck are considered an unfrequent clinico-pathological entity. Combined modality treatment represents an established therapeutic option for undifferentiated forms where distant metastasis is a common pattern of failure.

Methods: We report on a case of NSNEC treated with sequential chemo-radiation consisting of 6 cycles of cisplatin and etoposide followed by loco-regional radiation to the head and neck and simultaneous prophylactic cranial irradiation to prevent from intracranial spread, delivered with helical tomotherapy with the 'hippocampal avoidance' technique in order to reduce neuro-cognitive late effects.

TomoDirect: an efficient means to deliver radiation at static angles with tomotherapy.

Aims And Background: The TomoTherapy Hi-Art II system is able to deliver dynamic intensity-modulated radiation therapy within a helical geometry providing robust conformality and modulation, abrupt dose falloff, and reliable accuracy. A new upgrade named TomoDirect was introduced recently, allowing delivery of radiation at discrete angles with a fixed gantry. We present our preliminary clinical experience with TomoDirect.

Accelerated hypofractionated adjuvant whole breast radiotherapy with concomitant photon boost after conserving surgery for early stage breast cancer: a prospective evaluation on 463 patients.

The current standard therapeutic option for early stage breast cancer (EBC) employs a multimodality treatment approach including conservative surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, and hormone therapy. The most common adjuvant radiotherapeutic strategy consists of external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) delivered to the whole breast using 1.8-2 Gy fractions given five times a week, up to a total dose of 45-50 Gy over a period of 5 weeks.

The use of a diode matrix in commissioning activities for electron energies > or = 9 MeV: a feasibility study.

The contribution of a commercially available diode matrix (MapCHECK, provided by Sun Nuclear, Melbourne, FL) for the commissioning procedures of the voxel based Monte Carlo (VMC++) algorithm for electron beams of MasterPlan treatment planning system was investigated. The attention is mainly focused on the calculation in homogeneous and heterogeneous phantoms. With this aim, following a data set similar to that proposed by Electron Collaborative Working Group (ECWG), the dose profiles and two-dimensional (2D) dose distributions measured by the diode matrix were compared with the calculated ones using the gamma analysis method with acceptance criteria for the dose difference and the distance to agreement equal to 4% and 4 mm, respectively.