(Tuesday, 7/31/2018) 1:45 PM - 3:45 PM
Room: Room 207
This session will be the first of its kind that is aimed at establishing a long-term collaborative partnership between the Children's Oncology Group (COG) and the AAPM to address some of the unique challenges we face while treating children with radiation therapy. Radiation Physicists have an important role to play in tackling many of these challenges that may include: developing novel radiation techniques to treat certain childhood malignancies; improving current strategies to facilitate normal tissue and target definition during routine radiation therapy planning; providing consensus recommendations for proton therapy planning and delivery; exploring strategies to limit radiation exposure during modern radiation therapy including IGRT; improving techniques currently used for total body irradiation; finding applications for novel physics research techniques such as deep machine learning, phantom dosimetry etc. to further our understanding of radiation therapy outcomes in children using the COG database and imaging and planning data archived at the Imaging and Radiation Oncology Core (IROC) Rhode Island. The COG welcomes input and participation from AAPM members in addressing these and other challenges and will officially invite AAPM members to become COG members in order to facilitate their participation to help improve the current standards of care in pediatric radiation oncology.
Pediatric imaging in the context of cancer treatment is often multi-modality and frequent by nature. Multi-modality imaging for cancer treatment is necessary since each imaging modality bares its own strengths and weaknesses. The benefit of multi-modality imaging is that the strengths of each imaging modality may be combined to better define the disease, and the response of the disease to treatment. Unfortunately, imaging for cancer often includes frequent imaging with multiple modalities across the course of treatment, namely imaging for: diagnosis, staging, treatment planning, treatment response, and if successful, lifetime surveillance. The burden pediatric patients experience from frequent, multi-modality imaging stems from increased incidences of sedation, ionizing radiation, and stress that are imposed on the patient. The purpose of this talk will be to, first, demonstrate, through several case studies, the totality of imaging often required of patients undergoing typical COG-based neuroblastoma and Wilms tumor treatment regiments, and second, discuss advances in technology and other strategies that may be employed to help mitigate some of the burden from imaging for cancer related treatment.
Learning Objectives:
1. Understand the challenges of treating pediatric cancer patients with radiation therapy.
2. Be updated on the contemporary practice and areas of improvement in pediatric imaging for diagnosis, radiation delivery guidance, and response assessment.
3. Learn about how medical physicists can contribute to the fields of pediatric radiation oncology and diagnostic radiology.
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