ABSTRACT
The first hospital-based treatment facilities for particle therapy started operation about thirty years ago. Since then, the clinical experience with protons and carbon ions has grown continuously and more than 200,000 patients have been treated to date. The promising clinical results led to a rapidly increasing number of treatment facilities and many new facilities are planned or under construction all over the world. An inverted depth-dose profile combined with potential radiobiological advantages make charged particles a precious tool for the treatment of tumours that are particularly radioresistant or located nearby sensitive structures. A rising number of trials have already confirmed the benefits of particle therapy in selected clinical situations and further improvements in beam delivery, image guidance and treatment planning are expected. This review summarises some physical and biological characteristics of accelerated charged particles and gives some examples of their clinical application. Furthermore, challenges and future perspectives of particle therapy will be discussed.
Subject(s)
Precision Medicine/trends , Radiation Oncology/trends , Radiotherapy, High-Energy/trends , Humans , Particle Accelerators , Proton Therapy , Radiotherapy Dosage , Radiotherapy Planning, Computer-AssistedABSTRACT
Mortality of pear psylla to amitraz was studied by means of bioassays. Variation between samples, temporal variation within the season in one orchard and spatial variation between Swiss regions were considered. Variation between samples was large enough to produce different Probit functions and LC50 values. Temporal and spatial variations were too small to indicate resistance. Prediction intervals of the pooled functions using bootstrapping were calculated to determine if future samples come from a population with decreased sensitivity. Probabilistic criteria on the population level were proposed for resistance.
