الفهرس 
INTRODUCTIONOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Radiotherapy is an integral part of treatment of breast cancer. It improves disease control and lowers the rate of local recurrence. It is also used as salvage therapy. There are draw backs of breast radiation therapy, both short term and longterm. This is mainly due to the irradiation of organs at risk. The dose to the organs at risk more often than not influences the treatment planning. We always aim to attain an equilibrium where we give adequate dose to the target while minimizing the dose to the organs at risk as much as possible.
One of the ways of achieving this balance has notably been with the use of newer technology. This has led to the comparisons between these different techniques.
We aimed to carry out a dosimetric comparison between tangential 3DCRT with virtual wedges and field-in-field forward planned IMRT. We recruited 20 breast cancer patients who had undergone breast conserving surgery and were due for whole breast radiotherapy. 50% of the patients had right sided disease while the other 50% had left sided disease. The data about the dose to the CTV and organs at risk were collected and analyzed using SPSS version 20.
We found that the doses to the CTV in field-in-field forward planned IMRT were marginally lower than those in the tangential 3DCRT with virtual wedge technique. Both sets of dose characteristics were however within the therapeutically accepted ranges but this difference was statistically significant.
With regards to the doses to organs at risk, the field-in-field fpIMRT delivered lesser doses. Even though both techniques achieved the set dose volume constraints, these differences were similarly statistically significant.