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Dose Evaluation in Moving/Deforming Anatomy:
Methods and Clinical Implications
The aim of any radiotherapy is to tailor the radiation dose to the
tumoricidal target volume and to deliver as low radiation as possible
to all other normal tissues. However, the motion and deformation
induced in human tissue by the ventilatory motion is a major issue
since the standard practice usually uses only one computed tomography
(CT) scan (and hence one instance of the patient's anatomy) for
treatment planning. Even if the planning CT images are free of motion
artifacts, the interfraction movement that occurs due to physiological
processes within time scales shorter than the delivery of one
treatment fraction leads to differences between the planned and
delivered dose distributions during a fractionated treatment regimen.
Due to the influence of these differences on tumors and normal
tissues, the tumor control probabilities (TCPs) and normal tissue
complication probabilities (NTCPs) are likely to be impacted in the
face of organ motion. Moreover, as the recent advances in radiation
therapy provide improved segmentation and dose calculation methods,
the dose distributions conform more closely to targets and the
uncertainties associated with organ motion become more apparent and
they may limit the success of the conformal radiotherapy thereby
leading to local control failure and/or normal tissue complications.
It is thus not only desirable, but also necessary to generate, prior
to treatment, dose distributions that include the effects of the
treatment geometric uncertainties by using the time-varying anatomical
information as a substitute for the somewhat artificial (although
useful) PTV. The methods used to achieve this goal depend on the model
used to describe the patient's anatomy. The dose and fluence
convolution approaches for rigid organs will be first discussed. For
non-rigid behavior a dose reconstruction method that allows the
accumulation of the dose to the deforming anatomy will be presented
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