Introduction Each year more than 90,000 women are diagnosed with a gynecologic (ovarian, vulvar, vaginal, cervical, uterine, fallopian tube, or primary peritoneal) cancer in the United States. Radiotherapy is often…

Introduction The use of proton therapy for the treatment of cancer was first proposed by Robert Wilson in 1946. A beam of protons gives most of its dose at a…

Introduction This chapter describes the physics quality assurance (QA) program for the proton pencil beam scanning (PBS) gantry of the Hitachi ProBeat machine (Hitachi America, Ltd., Tarrytown, NY) at the…

Intensity-modulated proton therapy is effective for complex targets Proton beam therapy (PBT), with its characteristic Bragg peak, holds the promise of further reducing toxicity. Several techniques exist for the administration…

Introduction Numerous planning studies demonstrate superior dosimetry for proton radiotherapy compared with photon-based radiotherapy for breast cancers of all stages, even compared with intensity-modulated radiotherapy. Protons can reduce dose to…

Introduction Proton beam radiation (PBR) has the potential to improve the therapeutic ratio in the treatment of several gastrointestinal malignancies by decreasing the dose to nontarget critical structures. In general,…

Introduction For both primary and metastatic brain tumors, radiation therapy (RT) remains one of the standard treatment modalities. Although RT techniques using photons have greatly improved in recent decades, substantial…

Introduction In radiation oncology, “clinical commissioning,” or simply “commissioning,” refers to the process that takes place after a machine has passed acceptance tests but before the first patient can be…