Aims: Cancer remains a leading cause of death in children and adolescents in the developed world. Despite advances in oncological management, rates of primary treatment failure remain significant. Radiation of recurrent or metastatic disease improves survival in adults but there is little data to support clinical decision making in the paediatric/teenage and young adult population. Materials and methods: We present a retrospective case series of 14 patients treated with stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy or stereotactic radiosurgery at The Royal Marsden Hospital from September 2011 to December 2015. Eligible patients were aged <25 years, with Lansky/Karnofsky performance status 60 with confirmed relapsed or metastatic tumour in fewer than three sites. Follow-up was in accordance with standard clinical care and included regular outpatient review and radiological surveillance. Local control, progression-free survival and overall survival are presented. Results: Data for 14 patients with 18 treated lesions were included. The median patient age was 15 years (range 5e20 years). Nine patients were treated for local recurrence and five for metastatic lesions. All patients had already undergone multiple previous treatments. Eleven patients had undergone previous radiotherapy. The median interval between the completion of initial radiotherapy and reirradiation was 29.0 months (range 0.2e49.5 months). The median follow-up was 3.4 years (range 0.28e6.4 years). The 1-year local control rate was 78.6% and the 2-year local control rate was 57.1%. Overall median survival was 58.4 months (95% confidence interval 33.8e82.9 months). Cumulative biologically effective doses (BED) over 200 Gy were associated with late toxicity (P ¼ 0.04). Conclusion: Radical doses of short-course hypofractionated radiotherapy can achieve excellent local control and may contribute to the prolongation of overall survival. There is a need for prospective trials exploring the use of ablative radiotherapy in metastatic disease in paediatric/teenage and young adult patients in order to establish safe and effective treatment schedules.

Highlights Detailed RILD evolution described by objective radiological and pulmonary function measures. RILD is associated with volume loss of the treated lung and contralateral lung hyperinflation. Objective radiological findings might differentiate subjects with early versus late RILD. Most patients developed progressive lung damage, even when the early phase is absent/mild. Pre-RT lung function and RT dosimetry may identify subjects at increased risk of developing RILD.

Reducing radiation-induced side effects is one of the most important challenges in paediatric cancer treatment. Recently, there has been growing interest in using spatial normalisation to enable voxel-based analysis of radiation-induced toxicities in a variety of patient groups. The need to consider three-dimensional distribution of doses, rather than dose-volume histograms, is desirable but not yet explored in paediatric populations. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility of atlas construction and spatial normalisation in paediatric radiotherapy. We used planning computed tomography (CT) scans from twenty paediatric patients historically treated with craniospinal irradiation to generate a template CT that is suitable for spatial normalisation. This childhood cancer population representative template was constructed using groupwise image registration. An independent set of 53 subjects from a variety of childhood malignancies was then used to assess the quality of the propagation of new subjects to this common reference space using deformable image registration (i.e. spatial normalisation). The method was evaluated in terms of overall image similarity metrics, contour similarity and preservation of dose-volume properties. After spatial normalisation, we report a dice similarity coefficient of 0.95 ± 0.05, 0.85 ± 0.04, 0.96 ± 0.01, 0.91 ± 0.03, 0.83 ± 0.06 and 0.65 ± 0.16 for brain and spinal canal, ocular globes, lungs, liver, kidneys and bladder. We then demonstrated the potential advantages of an atlas-based approach to study the risk of second malignant neoplasms after radiotherapy. Our findings indicate satisfactory mapping between a heterogeneous group of patients and the template CT. The poorest performance was for organs in the abdominal and pelvic region, likely due to respiratory and physiological motion and to the highly deformable nature of abdominal organs. More specialised algorithms should be explored in the future to improve mapping in these regions. This study is the first step toward voxel-based analysis in radiation-induced toxicities following paediatric radiotherapy.

In this review, we discuss management options for oligometastatic colorectal cancer, including an overview of surgical concepts, the current literature on local ablative techniques including stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy (SABR), thermal ablation, selective internal radiotherapy (SIRT), transarterial chemo-embolization (TACE) and systemic therapy as an adjunct to local treatment strategies. We discuss the role of modern imaging techniques in selecting suitable patients for radical treatment.We also outline the role of the oncology multidisciplinary team meeting, which has become a key component in the care management pathway to ensure that the increasingly complex treatment strategies available are appropriately selected and combined for each individual patient. We review the available literature on the impact on quality of life that each treatment modality affords, recognizing the importance of embracing advances in medical technology whilst maintaining patient well-being as the center of focus.