William B. Harms

TL;DR: A composite distribution has recently been developed that presents the dose difference in regions that fail both dose-difference and DTA comparison criteria, and a technique is developed to unify dose distribution comparisons using the acceptance criteria.

TL;DR: The V20 from the total lung DVH is a useful parameter easily obtained from most 3D treatment planning systems and may be useful in comparing competing treatment plans to evaluate the risk of pneumonitis for individual patient treatment.

TL;DR: DVHs show promise as tools for comparing rival treatment plans for a specific patient by clearly presenting the uniformity of dose in the target volume and any hot spots in adjacent normal organs or tissues, but because of the loss of positional information in the volume under consideration, it should not be the sole criterion for plan evaluation.

TL;DR: The composite evaluation provides a method for the physicist to efficiently identify regions that fail both the dose-difference and DTA acceptance criteria, and provides a computer platform for the quantitative comparison of calculated and measured dose distributions.

TL;DR: Three-dimensional therapy for lung cancer has been practically implemented at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology and shows promising results in the preliminary analysis, however, the incidence of high-grade pneumonitis warrants careful selection of patients for future dose escalation.