Radiotherapy and the Human Brain: Towards a Better Understanding of Response

The major limitation of cancer treatment is normal tissue tolerance. When irradiating normal tissue, such as the normal brain tissue, one of the principal causes of complications is damage to the cerebral vasculature. If radiation is to benefit patients, it would be beneficial to know or be able to predict the consequences of irradiating the normal tissue. While there is some data relating loss of perfusion to radiation dose in other tissues such as lung, there is very little data for the brain. This book describes and analyzes the feasibility of an original method developed by the author in collaboration with the staff at the University of Calgary, Tom Baker Cancer Centre and Foothills Hospital in Calgary, Canada to investigate the relationship between the change in hemodynamic measures and the radiation dose delivered to the normal brain tissue following a typical brain tumour radiotherapy procedure. A generous amount of space has been dedicated to explaining some elementary concepts, since the book brings together information characteristic to various different fields, like Physics, Medical Diagnostic Imaging and Cancer Treatment.