BACKGROUND Melanoma is the primary malignancy that is most likely to metastasize to the brain. Because such an event carries an almost uniformly poor prognosis, the current study reviewed outcomes and identified associated prognostic indicators for 51 consecutive patients receiving gamma knife (GK) radiosurgery in the initial treatment of 188 intracranial melanoma metastases. METHODS Data were collected retrospectively from a single‐center GK radiosurgery database and from primary patient medical records and radiographs. RESULTS At presentation, 71% of patients had multiple intracranial metastases, and extracranial metastases were present in 66% of patients. Thirty‐two patients (63%) were initially treated with GK radiosurgery alone, whereas the remainder received GK radiosurgery in combination with surgery and/or whole‐brain radiotherapy (WBRT). Overall median survival from time of GK radiosurgery was 26 weeks. Subgroup analysis revealed a median survival of 77 weeks for patients presenting with a single lesion, compared with 20 weeks for patients presenting with multiple lesions (P = 0.003). Patients in recursive partitioning analysis (RPA) Class I survived a median of 57 weeks, compared with a median survival of 20 weeks for patients in RPA Class II or III (P = 0.002). Although long‐term imaging follow‐up revealed that a majority of patients experienced distant brain metastases, multivariate analysis showed that distant metastases occurred significantly sooner in patients with extracranial metastases (P = 0.0004). Addition of initial WBRT had no significant effect on the time to development of new brain metastases (P = 0.13). Local control (crude) was observed in 81% of lesions initially treated with GK. Patients experienced improved or stable symptoms for a median of 37 weeks post–GK radiosurgery. CONCLUSIONS Survival analyses supported the use of GK radiosurgery in the initial treatment of patients with melanoma brain metastases, with best results occurring in patients presenting with a single lesion. Cancer 2004. © 2004 American Cancer Society.

Purpose: Online Adaptive Radiation Therapy (oART) follows a different treatment paradigm than conventional radiotherapy, and because of this, the resources, implementation, and workflows needed are unique. The purpose of this report is to outline our institution's experience establishing, organizing, and implementing an oART program using the Ethos therapy system. Methods: We include resources used, operational models utilized, program creation timelines, and our institutional experiences with the implementation and operation of an oART program. Additionally, we provide a detailed summary of our first year's clinical experience where we delivered over 1000 daily adaptive fractions. For all treatments, the different stages of online adaption, primary patient set-up, initial kV-CBCT acquisition, contouring review and edit of influencer structures, target review and edits, plan evaluation and selection, Mobius3D 2nd check and adaptive QA, 2nd kV-CBCT for positional verification, treatment delivery, and patient leaving the room, were analyzed. Results: We retrospectively analyzed data from 97 patients treated from August 2021-August 2022. One thousand six hundred seventy seven individual fractions were treated and analyzed, 632(38%) were non-adaptive and 1045(62%) were adaptive. Seventy four of the 97 patients (76%) were treated with standard fractionation and 23 (24%) received stereotactic treatments. For the adaptive treatments, the generated adaptive plan was selected in 92% of treatments. On average(±std),adaptive sessions took 34.52 ± 11.42 min from start to finish.The entire adaptive process (from start of contour generation to verification CBCT), performed by the physicist (and physician on select days),was 19.84 ± 8.21 min. Conclusion:We present our institution's experience commissioning an oART program using the Ethos therapy system. It took us 12 months from project inception to the treatment of our first patient and 12 months to treat 1000 adaptive fractions. Retrospective analysis of delivered fractions showed that the average overall treatment time was approximately 35 min and the average time for the adaptive component of treatment was approximately 20 min.

Purpose: Online Adaptive Radiation Therapy(oART) follows a different treatment paradigm than conventional radiotherapy and, because of this, the resources, implementation, and workflows needed are unique. The purpose of this report is to outline our institution's experience establishing, organizing, and implementing an oART program using the Ethos therapy system. Methods: We include resources used; operational models utilized, program creation timelines, and our institutional experiences with implementation and operation of an oART program. Additionally, we provide a detailed summary of our first year's clinical experience where we delivered over 1000 daily adaptive fractions. For all treatments, the different stages of online adaption, primary patient set-up, initial kV-CBCT acquisition, contouring review and edit of influencer structures, target review and edits, plan evaluation and selection, Mobius3D 2nd check and adaptive QA, 2nd kV-CBCT for positional verification, treatment delivery, and patient leaving the room, were analyzed. Results: We retrospectively analyzed data from ninety-seven patients treated from August 2021-August 2022. 1677 individual fractions were treated and analyzed, 632(38%) were non-adaptive and 1045(62%) were adaptive. 74 of the 97 patients (76%) were treated with standard fractionation and 23 (24%) received stereotactic treatments. For the adaptive treatments, the generated adaptive plan was selected in 92% of treatments. On average(±std), adaptive sessions took 34.52±11.42 minutes from start to finish. The entire adaptive process (from start of contour generation to verification CBCT), performed by the physicist (and physician on select days), was 19.84±8.21 minutes. Conclusion: We present our institution's experience establishing, organizing, and implementing an oART program using the Ethos therapy system. It took us 12 months from project inception to treatment of our first patient and 12 months to treat 1000 adaptive fractions. Retrospective analysis of delivered fractions showed that average overall treatment time was approximately 35 minutes and average time for the adaptive component of treatment was approximately 20 minutes.

Primary central nervous system tumors are the most common solid neoplasm of childhood and the leading cause of cancer related death in pediatric patients. Survival rates for children with malignant supratentorial brain tumors are poor despite aggressive treatment with combinations of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy; and survivors often suffer from damaging lifelong sequelae from current therapies. Novel innovative treatments are greatly needed. One promising new approach is the use of a genetically engineered, conditionally replicating herpes simplex virus (HSV) that has shown tumor specific tropism and potential efficacy in the treatment of malignant brain tumors. G207 is a genetically engineered HSV-1 lacking genes essential for replication in normal brain cells. Safety has been established in preclinical investigations involving intracranial inoculation in the highly HSV-sensitive owl monkey (Aotus nancymai), and in three adult phase I trials in recurrent/progressive high-grade gliomas. No dose-limiting toxicities were seen in the adult studies and a maximum tolerated dose was not reached. Approximately half of the 35 treated adults had radiographic or neuropathologic evidence of response at a minimum of one time point. Preclinical studies in pediatric brain tumor models indicate that a variety of pediatric tumor types are highly sensitive to killing by G207. This clinical protocol outlines a first in human children study of intratumoral inoculation of an oncolytic virus via catheters placed directly into recurrent or progressive supratentorial malignant tumors.

marker offsets was 0.38 mm (range, 0.24-0.61 mm). Angular dependences of the offsets on gantry and couch rotations were not found. Conclusion: We performed the clinical commissioning and evaluated the localization accuracy of the novel patient positioning system. We have demonstrated that this system has a competent performance in terms of the high localization accuracy and low radiation dose for brain stereotactic radiotherapy.