Publications by authors named "R Weathers"

Radiation epidemiology studies of childhood cancer survivors treated in the pre-computed tomography (CT) era reconstruct the patients' treatment fields on computational phantoms. For such studies, the phantoms are commonly scaled to age at the time of radiotherapy treatment because age is the generally available anthropometric parameter. Several reference size phantoms are used in such studies, but reference size phantoms are only available at discrete ages (e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: We previously developed an age-scalable 3D computational phantom that has been widely used for retrospective whole-body dose reconstructions of conventional two-dimensional historic radiation therapy (RT) treatments in late effects studies of childhood cancer survivors. This phantom is modeled in the FORTRAN programming language and is not readily applicable for dose reconstructions for survivors treated with contemporary RT whose treatment plans were designed using computed tomography images and complex treatment fields. The goal of this work was to adapt the current FORTRAN model of our age-scalable computational phantom into Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard so that it can be used with any treatment planning system (TPS) to reconstruct contemporary RT.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Purpose: We previously evaluated late cardiac disease in long-term survivors in the Childhood Cancer Survivor Study (CCSS) based on heart radiation therapy (RT) doses estimated from an age-scaled phantom with a simple atlas-based heart model (H). We enhanced our phantom with a high-resolution CT-based anatomically realistic and validated age-scalable cardiac model (H). We aimed to evaluate how this update would impact our prior estimates of RT-related late cardiac disease risk in the CCSS cohort.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Childhood cancer survivors have a higher chance of getting a second type of cancer called secondary primary leukemia (SPL), but not much is known about why this happens because past studies were small.
  • Researchers combined data from multiple studies to better understand the risk factors by looking at treatments kids received between 1930 and 2000.
  • They found that certain treatments, like a special kind of medicine called topoisomerase II inhibitors and the amount of radiation used, increased the chance of getting SPL, especially in the first ten years after treatment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background And Purpose: Radiation therapy is a risk factor for late cardiac disease in childhood cancer survivors. Several pediatric cohort studies have established whole heart dose and dose-volume response models. Emerging data suggest that dose to cardiac substructures may be more predictive than whole heart metrics.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF