Improving Effectiveness and Accuracy of Radiation Therapy

描述（由申请人提供）：简介：通过提高放射治疗计算的准确性，可以提高放射治疗的有效性。拟议的研究将集中在两种类型的癌症，前列腺癌和肺癌。提出的前列腺癌研究是早期工作的延伸，而肺癌研究是一个新的研究领域。背景：前列腺癌的治疗在大多数情况下是成功的。尽管每8名男性中就有1人被诊断患有前列腺癌，但只有1 / 34的人会死于前列腺癌（美国癌症协会）。Specific Aims 1和2中提出的研究重点是通过增加对前列腺癌调强放疗（IMRT）剂量分布和副作用的了解来减少不良辐射副作用。该项目的目标是为放射肿瘤学家提供必要的信息，以便为个别患者选择最合适的光束能量。肺癌是美国癌症死亡的主要原因，大约10个肺癌患者中有6个在确诊后一年内死亡（美国癌症协会）。提高肺癌的治疗效果势在必行。具体目标3和4侧重于提高肺癌放射治疗剂量计算的准确性，长期目标是了解提高治愈率需要多少放射剂量。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Introduction: Effectiveness of radiation therapy can be improved through increased accuracy in radiotherapy calculations. The proposed research will focus on two types of cancer, prostate and lung. The proposed prostate cancer research is an extension of earlier work while the lung cancer research is a new area of interest. Background: Treatment for prostate cancer is successful in most cases. Although 1 in 8 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, only 1 in 34 will die from prostate cancer (American Cancer Society). Research proposed in Specific Aims 1 and 2 focuses on decreasing adverse radiation side-effects by increasing the understanding of dose distributions and side effects from Intensity Modulated Radiation therapy (IMRT) for prostate cancer. The goal of this project is to provide Radiation Oncologists the necessary information to select the most appropriate beam energy for individual patients. Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer death in the United States, approximately 6 out of 10 people with lung cancer die within 1 year of being diagnosed (American Cancer Society). Improving the therapeutic gains in lung cancer is imperative. Specific Aims 3 and 4 focus on improving the accuracy of dose calculations in lung cancer radiation therapy with the long term goal of understanding how much radiation dose is necessary to increase cure rates. Hypothesis: Increased accuracy in radiotherapy dose calculations can reduce adverse side effects from prostate cancer radiotherapy and can increase the therapeutic gain for lung cancer radiotherapy. Specific Aims: The following research aims will be addressed: (1) Perform skin dose measurements to evaluate skin reactions for prostate cancer patients treated with 6MV beam energy for IMRT; (2) Perform Monte Carlo calculations (in phantom) of dose to peripheral organs from IMRT, expandable to individual patient calculations; three years of protected time to facilitate her transition to an established cancer researcher. Her research plan is based on her previous work in improving the quantification of dosage effects for intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT). The previous submission was primarily critiqued for lack of a full breadth of training activities and for brevity of research methods including a lack of statistical analyses methods and justification.