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Regional Training Course on Radiotherapy Imaging

Date: 29 April – 4 May 2019
Location: MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX, USA
Language: English and Spanish

Application Deadline for Nominee(s) of Invited IAEA Member States: 15 February 2019

Purpose

The purpose of the event is to train medical physicists on the use of diagnostics images and techniques in radiotherapy.

Course Description

Images have become the necessary tool for every step of the process to treat cancer patients using radiation. Starting with the diagnosis of the case followed by the definition of the gross tumor and the extended microscopic areas to the planning of the treatment, its verification, quality assurance, verification during each treatment, etc the work is mostly based on a wide variety of images from the patient that include standard x-rays, CT, MR, US, Nuclear Medicine, etc. The accuracy and the variety of these images determines the strength of its correlation to the actual treatment together with the accuracy of dose and its distribution and the quality of the reproducibility of the positioning of the patient during the delivery of each fraction. This course seeks to cover these aspects using presentations, demos and group practices for the common current techniques in radiotherapy 3DCRT, IMRT, iGRT and 4D CRT EBRT with linear accelerators, CyberKnife and Tomo units as well as HDR brachytherapy and SRS using GammaKnife. The course assumes knowledge and previous experience with some of these techniques and seeks to concentrate on the role of images in the processes.

Topics to be covered

  • Imaging for diagnosis and contouring
  • CT images for RT planning
  • NM images for RT planning
  • Accreditation of PET/CT scanners
  • MRI images for RT planning
  • Ultrasound images for RT planning or delivery
  • Registration and fusion of different types of diagnostic images for RT planning
  • RT planning (including CTV-PTV margins)
  • In-room imaging in radiotherapy (kV, MV, other)
  • Quantification of dose from imaging
  • Commissioning and QA of imaging techniques used in RT
  • Practical sessions on:
    • QA of imaging equipment and processes
    • QA of in-room imaging techniques
    • RT planning (e.g. optimization, margins, registration and fusion)
    • end-to-end testing of imaging processes
  • Imaging for 3D-CRT
  • Imaging for advanced external-beam radiotherapy (IGRT, SMRT, SRS)
  • Imaging for brachytherapy (planar X-ray, CT, MRI, US)