Radiation Oncology
Expert insights on radiation treatment planning, techniques, toxicity management, and multimodal cancer care.
Recent Discussions
Are there scenarios that new visits/consults with patients can be done virtually amidst the COVID-19 outbreak?
Starting 3/16, we began offering lower-complexity / lower-risk patients the option of having a Tele-medicine consult vs re-scheduling to a later date. This offer has been extended broadly to all new consults at our facility when the provider indicates that s/he can extend comparable service virtuall...
Does receipt of chemoimmunotherapy for LS-SCLC impact your recommendation for PCI?
Historic data showed that the addition of PCI for patients with limited-stage small cell lung cancer showing response after chemoradiotherapy improves overall survival and decreases brain failure rates by about 50%. Recently, the addition of consolidation immunotherapy after concurrent chemoradiothe...
Do you treat synchronous bilateral breast cancers with RT simultaneously or sequentially?
We see a fair number of synchronous bilateral cases here. I am not aware of any compelling arguments or data for sequential treatment over simultaneous. Simultaneous is more efficient in terms of overall length of time, and allows for better coordination of the fields (but there is more time on the ...
Would you offer re-irradiation for a prostate local recurrence after I-125 seed implant >10 years ago in a healthy young patient with life expectancy >15 years?
While I think salvage re-irradiation does have the potential to become a routine option in such situations, I think further study is required to define both the efficacy and toxicity profile prior to establishing it as such. The current state of knowledge is based on limited information, as Dr. @Dr....
Do you recommend IM biopsy in the initial staging of breast cancer patients with suspicious IM nodes on imaging?
I think it is always preferable to biopsy suspected cancer sites when developing a therapeutic plan. Biopsy provides a greater degree of certainty in clinical decision making and can be informative when evaluating outcomes of care retrospectively for quality improvement or research projects. However...
Is pre-treatment nodal ultrasound evaluation necessary if a patient undergoes upfront PET/CT for staging?
The answer to this question depends greatly on the local capabilities to conduct regional nodal ultrasound. If this can be done, then we find ultrasound to be very helpful. In today’s environment, it is difficult to obtain insurance approval for PET in the staging of node-positive breast cancer. Bey...
Should we consider radiation therapy for patients with N2 EGFRm NSCLC who will receive osimertinib, though RT was excluded on ADAURA?
For an EGFR-mutant N2 disease, we favor adjuvant chemotherapy (OS benefit) and/or adjuvant TKI based on ADAURA trial (DFS survival). The only prospective data regarding the use of adjuvant radiotherapy comes from a phase III trial, Lung Adjuvant Radiotherapy Trial (Lung-ART), where patients were ran...
Given the results of PORTEC-4A, what adjuvant therapy, if any, would you offer a patient with a POLE-mutant endometrial cancer who also has a p53 mutation and substantial (>5 foci) of LVSI?
When you have dual mutation, the better of the two mutations drives the outcome, so it would be treated like a POLE-type. If substantial LVSI and pathological nodal assessment are done, I would favor Brachy alone. If nodes are not assessed, I would favor EBRT. The link below has references about dua...
Should hippocampal-avoidance WBRT be the default option for WBRT?
I think this is a difficult question to answer as a lot depends on the particulars. Here's a list of some of those issues: Radiosurgery is very easily administered & frequently free of toxicity. Systemic agents are showing improved efficacy in the brain. Surveillance MR imaging = lower incidence of ...
How long after achieving a CR would you consider stopping pembrolizumab in metastatic melanoma?
Based on Keynote 001 and more recently on Keynote 006, where we observed sustained remission in more than 90% of the patients who had stopped pembrolizumab for complete response, we usually consider stopping pembrolizumab in patients who have a confirmed complete response (this means that we have tw...