Understanding Pulse Reduced Dose Rate Radiotherapy

Rupesh R. Kotecha, MD, chief of Radiosurgery and director of Central Nervous System Metastasis at Baptist Health Miami Cancer Institute, discusses a newer radiation modality known as pulse reduced dose rate radiation therapy.

Kotecha co-authored a study that used pulse reduced dose rate radiation therapy and presented the research at the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) Annual Meeting.

Transcript:

0:07 | Pulse reduced dose rate radiation therapy is a very specific reirradiation approach, which has been used primarily in the central nervous system space for recurrent primary brain tumors. But it's also been explored in a couple of circumstances outside of the brain itself. Now, this research was previously limited to very few institutions who had experience with using this technique, and also who see this patient volume. Typically, patients with recurrent primary brain tumors traveled to specific centers of excellence or those who have clinical trials. And then sometimes those centers may not have clinical trials that the patient will be eligible for. But then we have a larger experience or volume of patients with that particular need.

0:53 | So, this was developed at a number of institutions, as one of those re-irradiation approaches to try and control the disease after somebody has progressed on multiple lines of systemic therapy. We had previously known at least in the limited series that had been done, that there was some aspect of disease control that looked very favorable, and the order of maybe six months or so longer in some series, shorter and other series.

1:19 | The purpose of our study was to do two things. Number one is to actually incorporate the prior radiation therapy plans, and then add the new reirradiation plans together to come up with those constraints, safety threat thresholds that could be used in the future when patients are undergoing radiation. The second goal was to basically pull the analyses from these different institutions so that we would know what [the] composite outcomes are, not just what does institution A or B, or C actually present or publish. But what happens when you pull all the outcomes together statistically, to look at what those outcomes could be across all of the institutions