• Radiation Oncology Journal
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• v.33 no.2
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• pp.155-159
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• 2015

We present a case of cervical cancer treated by concurrent chemoradiation. In radiation therapy part, the combination of the whole pelvic helical tomotherapy plus image-guided brachytherapy with megavoltage computed tomography of helical tomotherapy was performed. We propose this therapeutic approach could be considered in a curative setting in some problematic situation as our institution.

• Asian Pacific Journal of Cancer Prevention
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• v.15 no.8
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• pp.3619-3623
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• 2014

Background: The aim of the study was to evaluate the vaginal dose and toxicity in patients of cervical cancer treated with image guided brachytherapy at our institute. Materials and Methods: Thirty-five patients treated with image based brachytherapy for cervical cancer were included. Vaginal contouring was done on MRI at brachytherapy and with CT scans of subsequent brachytherapy fractions. Dose volume parameters (DVH) were reported in accordance with the GEC-ESTRO guidelines. These were correlated with vaginal toxicity (assessed by CTCAE version 3) and quality of sexual life assessed at one year of completion of treatment. Results: Vaginal shortness was observed in 22 out of 30 (62.8%) patients, Nine (25.7%) had vaginal dryness and in 10 (28.5%) patients, there was contact bleeding. No association could be demonstrated between the dose volume parameters and vaginal toxicity in the present study. Conclusions: The lack of association between dose volume parameters of vagina with vaginal morbidity may be due to uncertainties involved in the delineation of vaginal wall and dosimetry. Future research is required to accurately define vaginal dose distribution to study its correlation with vaginal morbidity. Vaginal morbidity needs to be documented in order to improve the sexual outcome in these patients.

• Radiation Oncology Journal
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• v.36 no.4
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• pp.254-264
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• 2018

This article reviewed new trends and controversial issues, including the intensification of chemotherapy and recent brachytherapy (BT) advances, and also reviewed recent consensuses from different societies on the management of locally advanced cervical cancer (LACC). Intensive chemotherapy during and after radiation therapy (RT) was not recommended as a standard treatment due to severe toxicities reported by several studies. The use of positron emission tomography-computed tomography (PET-CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) for pelvic RT planning has increased the clinical utilization of intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) for the evaluation of pelvic lymph node metastasis and pelvic bone marrow. Recent RT techniques for LACC patients mainly aim to minimize toxicities by sparing the normal bladder and rectum tissues and shortening the overall treatment time by administering a simultaneous integrated boost for metastatic pelvic lymph node in pelvic IMRT followed by MRI-based image guided adaptive BT.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Medical Physics Conference
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• 2002.09a
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• pp.154-156
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• 2002

Brachytherapy has a long history in the treatment of cancer. However, the treatment planning technique for brachytherapy has lagged somewhat behind the corresponding developments for external beam therapy as far as the imaging technique is concerned. Currently, the orthogonal-film-based treatment planning is performed at most institutions even though the CT-based planning is available. The aim of this study is to evaluate the CT-based vs. the orthogonal-film-based treatment planning in cervix cancer. The doses to point A, point B, rectum and bladder points according to ICRU 38 were calculated for the two methods above. In addition, the volumetric studies such as 3D dose computation and DVH were obtained for the CT-based planning. For the bulky tumor, the isodose lines of point A prescription were not fairly covered for the CTV. The CT -based dose planning can overestimate the maximum dose delivered to bladder and rectum by 30%. The CT-based planning has several advantages over the orthogonal-film-based such as 3D dose display, DVH, and more accurate target delineation. It is suggested that the prescription point in cervix cancer be revised especially for the bulky tumor.

• Journal of Biomedical Engineering Research
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• v.41 no.5
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• pp.195-202
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• 2020

Needle detection in ultrasound images is sometimes difficult due to obstruction of fat tissues. Accurate needle detection using continuous ultrasound (CUS) images is a vital stage of treatment planning for tissue biopsy and brachytherapy. The main goal of the study is classified into two categories. First, new detection model, i.e. D-Attention Unet, is developed by combining the context information of 3D medical data and CUS images. Second, the D-Attention Unet model was compared with other models to verify its usefulness for needle detection in continuous ultrasound images. The continuous needle images taken with ultrasonic waves were converted into still images for dataset to evaluate the performance of the D-Attention Unet. The dataset was used for training and testing. Based on the results, the proposed D-Attention Unet model showed the better performance than other 3 models (Unet, D-Unet and Attention Unet), with Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC), Recall and Precision at 71.9%, 70.6% and 73.7%, respectively. In conclusion, the D-Attention Unet model provides accurate needle detection for US-guided biopsy or brachytherapy, facilitating the clinical workflow. Especially, this kind of research is enthusiastically being performed on how to add image processing techniques to learning techniques. Thus, the proposed method is applied in this manner, it will be more effective technique than before.