Back
Sep 30
Education

EDU 38 - Raising the Bar and Lowering Uncertainties in Reirradiation

12:45pm - 02:00pm PT
Radiation and Cancer Physics

MODERATOR(S)

Michael Velec, PhD, RT - Princess Margaret Cancer Centre

session DESCRIPTION

With technological advances re-irradiation has rapidly become common and an important part of cancer management to new or recurrent tumors, yet is clinically challenging given risks of serious toxicity from cumulative doses. Institutional re-irradiation practices vary widely, though often involve a series of highly complex technical procedures coordinated by an interdisciplinary care team including across institutions. In the absence of evidence-based guidelines on re-irradiation best practices, an ESTRO-EORTC consensus paper has outlined technical aspects that must be accounted for in order to guide re-irradiation strategies. These include radiobiology and functional imaging to account for tissue recovery, and dosimetry aspects such as the using of deformable image registration to estimate cumulative doses in drastically different patient anatomy. Understanding the appropriateness and limitations of these processes is critical in their routine application in the clinic, and therefore re-irradiation necessitates interdisciplinary collaboration between oncologists, physicists, therapists and other team members. This education session will ultimately facilitate more consistent, safe and high-quality care for patients receiving re-irradiation to manage their cancer.

learning objectives

  1. Implement routine clinical workflows for re-irradiation cases to communicate, document and account for all previous radiation treatments.
  2. Determine optimal use of reirradiation dose summation methods, including deformable image registration.
  3. Explain radiobiological considerations, including tissue recovery, and functional imaging studies that may be used to analyze function post treatment.

Credits

AMA PRA Category 1 Credits: 1.25

Presentations