Improve the management of patients with skull bone metastases by means of helical tomotherapy

Excerpt

The skeleton is the first and most common site of distant metastases in breast cancer patients. Tumor bone disease is responsible for a considerable morbidity and markedly decreases the quality of life of patients [1]. Although providing rapid and lasting pain relief in symptomatic bone metastases, external beam radiotherapy may be associated with treatment-induced morbidity, particularly in patients with multiple skull metastases. For those patients, conventional radiotherapy may be deleterious, delivering high radiation doses to critical organs such as eyes or brain and leading to potential subsequent progressive neurocognitive decline. Helical tomotherapy (HT) combines intensity modulated fan-beam radiotherapy with megavoltage computed tomography imaging for patient positioning [2]. Its availability has recently opened new fields of exploration for palliative radiotherapy due to its ability to tailor very sharp dose distributions around the target volumes. …