BJR, the international research journal of the British Institute of Radiology, has published a collection of articles on proton therapy, guest edited by leading experts Dr Kathryn Held, Professor Tony Lomax and Professor Esther Troost. The BIR have also recorded an accompanying podcast with the Guest Editors, who share their thoughts on this rapidly expanding field and the important BJR special feature.
Both the special feature and podcast highlight advances in proton therapy in the areas of biology, physics and clinical studies, reviewing the latest research and clinical findings and identifying challenges and opportunities for further research and development. These fascinating, high quality articles will be of interest to an international, multidisciplinary audience.
Professor Tony Lomax said “This special feature is essential reading for anyone interested in proton therapy. The Review articles relating to medical physics aspects of proton therapy cover vital topics such as range uncertainty and neutron dose, through to the use of protons for high dose rate and spatially fractionated treatments, FLASH and minibeams”.
Proton therapy for cancers of various types is expanding rapidly all around the world. Almost 200,000 patients have been treated with protons, and innovative treatment approaches and exciting results from clinical studies are regularly appearing in the literature.
Dr Kathryn Held said, “This is an exciting time for proton therapy research and our special feature is enriched by some excellent original research articles. The biology papers are illuminating and cover key areas such as proton relative biological effectiveness, proton and immunotherapy, hypofractionation and minibeam proton therapy”.
Professor Esther Troost explains “This special feature highlights the growing impact proton therapy is having in the clinic. There are articles covering a variety of clinical applications of proton therapy, focusing on tumour sites such as head and neck, brain, non-small cell lung cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma, cholangiocarcinomas and pancreatic cancers. With such a wide range of insightful content, this special feature is not to be missed!”.
You can access the special feature here: https://www.birpublications.org/toc/bjr/93/1107
You can listen to the podcast here: https://www.birpublications.org/page/podcasts/2020/proton-therapy-sf
Images
Figure 1: Figure 4 https://doi.org/10.1259/bjr.20190582 (physics paper)
Figure 2: Figure 1 from https://doi.org/10.1259/bjr.20190378 (clinical paper)
High res images available.
