Improving the therapeutic ratio of stereotactic radiosurgery and radiotherapy

Abstract: New methods of high dose delivery, such as intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), stereotactic radiation therapy (SRT) or stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), hadron therapy, tomotherapy, etc., all make use of a few large fractions. To improve these treatments, there are three main directions: (i) improving physical dose distribution, (ii) optimizing radiosurgery dose-time scheme and (iii) modifying dose response of tumors or normal tissues.Different radiation modalities and systems have been developed to deliver the best possible physical dose to the target while keeping radiation to normal tissue minimum. Although applications of radiobiological findings to clinical practice are still at an early stage, many studies have shown that   sublethal radiation damage repair kinetics plays an important role in tissue response to radiation.The purpose of the present thesis is to show how the above-mentioned directions could be used to improve treatment outcomes with special interest in radiation modalities and dose-time scheme, as well as radiobiological modeling. Also for arteriovenous malformations (AVM), the possible impact of AVM network angiostructure in radiation response was studied.