Treatment Planning CourseFor this quarter, Alex decided to change our seminar class to a treatment planning course. This course involves working on a treatment plan for a different patient every week. Each student gets to present once and this coming Tuesday happens to be my lucky day.
This week, we were supposed to construct a plan that would treat a little girl’s brain tumor. The critical structures included the temporal lobes, pituitary gland, spinal cord, optic nerves and the eyes. Our team got together on Thursday and we put together a reasonable plan. Unfortunately, we couldn’t cover the tumor with the prescription dose of 95%. On Friday, I came in and worked on it a bit more and was able to conform the dose to the tumor. However, the tumor was getting 91% of the dose. I was able to bring down the pituitary and temporal lobe doses significantly.
Today, Neil, Yu and I got together and we finished the plan. We pushed the dose to 97% - something other teams couldn’t get. I think it is attributed to the fact that our beams were at strange, but useful locations.
Look through the images to see the tumor volume and our final beam arrangement.
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that graph looks pretty sophisticated and high tech. cGy = centigray? what is the colored stuff? cerebellar tumor?