How Best To Dispose of Extra-Tumoral Dose: A Cautionary Note for Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy

In designing radiation treatments, there is little choice as to how much energy (i.e., integral dose) will be deposited outside the target volume, given a fixed radiation quality and prescription dose. The principal choice is “Where to deposit this energy?” In addition to having to limit the dose to specific organs at risk (OARs), planners face one of the important general questions in radiotherapy: “Is it better to dispose of the integral dose...