Potential improvement of three dimension treatment planning and proton beams in fractionated radiotherapy of large cerebral arteriovenous malformations.
The treatment of large cerebral arteriovenous malformations is a surgical challenge, especially for deep seated brain locations. Furthermore, these lesions are unfit for radiosurgical approaches due to a high risk of complications secondary to high radiation doses to large brain volumes. Fractionated precision radiotherapy can potentially deliver high, uniform, target-contoured dose distributions optimizing the dose reduction to the critical surrounding brain. The results of a study are presented in such a way that dose distributions achievable with proton beams are compared to those with 10 MV x-rays; and the potential improvements with protons evaluated, relying heavily on dose-volume histograms to examine the coverage of the lesion as well as the dose to the normal brain, brain-stem, and optic chiasm.
Department of Radiation Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston 02114.
R
R
Miralbell
M
M
Urie
D006801:Humans; D007091:Image Processing, Computer-Assisted; D002538:Intracranial Arteriovenous Malformations / Q000532:radiotherapy*; D011522:Protons; D011879:Radiotherapy Dosage; D011880:Radiotherapy Planning, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*
D011522:Protons