Radiation Oncology
Expert insights on radiation treatment planning, techniques, toxicity management, and multimodal cancer care.
Recent Discussions
Would you use upfront atezo/bev in a patient with HCC and untreated hepatitis?
In the case of a patient with untreated chronic hepatitis C, I would offer upfront atezo/bev, as long as hepatic function is appropriate. At our center, hepatitis C treatment is generally not offered to patients with advanced HCC. Interestingly, only 21% of patients treated with atezolizumab/bevaciz...
What factors do you consider when selecting dose/fractionation for whole brain radiotherapy?
I assume this question is for brain metastases patients who are not eligible for hippocampal avoidance WBRT (ineligible criteria including but not limited to - mets 5 mm within either hippocampus, germ cell/small cell/lymphoma, leptomeningeal disease, etc.) - my default WBRT dose fractionation is 30...
How do you check surface dose when treating post-mastectomy patients with radiation?
We have stopped using bolus except for t4b , dermal or extensive LVSI , pathological dermis involved or positive margins . In cases where we use bolus check with in Vivo dosimetry and aim for 90 percent or above dose . Other situation may use bolus is very thin chest wall to build up dose to chest w...
Would you offer empiric lung SBRT for two growing FDG-avid lung lesions in a patient with severe COPD on oxygen?
This is a good question! The short answer is yes, most likely. Many patients are too high-risk to receive biopsies; this is decided by surgery/pulm/IR. Unless the patient has contraindications to RT or something like severe IPF (where treatment may be worse than the disease), I would likely offer th...
What are fractionation options for a patient with progressive jugular foramen paraganglioma now causing multiple cranial nerve deficits?
I typically individualize fractionation based on tumor volume, proximity to brainstem and cochlea/IAC (especially when serviceable hearing is present), and the pattern of cranial nerve deficits. For tumors <35 cc, I favor SBRT 24 Gy in 3 fractions, with escalation to 27 Gy when aiming for maximal tu...
Are there any volumetric constraints associated with toxicity in the dose range that is moderately above prescription (i.e. 30-35 Gy range), when planning hippocampal-sparing whole brain radiation?
This is an important question worth some discussion. As the question mentions, clinical trials of HA-WBRT have permitted a hot spot of 133% of the prescription dose of 30 Gy (or 40 Gy) to D2% of the whole-brain parenchyma as an acceptable protocol variation. Importantly, none of these trials have de...
Do you recommend chemoradiation following neoadjuvant FOLFIRINOX for resectable pancreatic cancer?
Tough question, with lots of evolution in this area in the past few years. The data would suggest that for borderline resectable pancreatic cancer, there is a benefit in terms of OS from preoperative treatment. For unresectable disease, the small chance of conversion into resectability is worth the ...
Do you use either memantine or hippocampal sparing technique to preserve cognitive function when giving whole brain radiotherapy?
Dr. @Dr. First Last and I put together the response below:We use memantine and hippocampal sparing technique for all brain metastasis patients who are planning to receive WBRT. This is based off the recently published phase III trial NRG CC001 that found hippocampal avoidance WBRT plus memantine res...
For an non-operative patient with IB1 cervical cancer, would you recommend RT alone or concurrent chemoRT for definitive therapy?
I usually favor RT alone as local control and the outcome is excellent unless they have adenocarcinoma, a suspicious pelvic node, or multiple high risk features (high grade with LVSI on bx).
Is long term ADT now the standard of care with salvage prostate bed RT?
The dreaded hormone question...After 40 years of embarking on extremely well designed randomized trials, we still are confused about the who, what, when of ADT. Will RTOG 9601 create a new care standard? As @Dr. First Last said, I think we will see increased utilization. I have been using bicalutami...