Non-Conventional Radiotherapy for Total Body Irradiation: Antecedents, Current Research and Perspectives

Abstract

In addition to the conventional techniques used in radiotherapy, certain procedures, special-called for the treatment of both some cancer diseases and clinical application are usually required. Such practices typically manifest a technical problem with respect to the equipment used, which requires important adjusts that diverge significantly from the standard implemented in the common treatments. Total body irradiation is one of those special techniques, in which the radiation target is the entire patient body. In a broad sense, the concept covers all radiation processes with photon beam fields more wide than standard field size. Treatment with total body irradiation is usually applied with purpose of providing immunosuppression to prevent rejection in bone marrow transplantation procedure. Diseases such as aplastic anemia and a varied number of leukemia and lymphomas respond favorably to this treatment scheme. Beams of megavoltage photons, such as Cobalt sources and linear accelerators, are used for such purposes. In this chapter, the technique will be studied analyzing its definition and first applications. The chapter includes a description of the main treatment schemes on which it is based, covering the calibration process, ergonomic criteria as well as the main contributions in the clinical research field, opportunity fields and novel research perspectives.