Purpose : Brachytherapy is the main component in treatment of patients with uterine cervical cancer. The reproducibility of applicator position in the same patient at repeated treatments was very important for accurate dose delivery. It was aimed to evaluate the change of applicator location between each high dose rate(HDR) brachytherapy insertion in the patients with uterine cervical cancer.
Materials and Methods : From January 1999 to October 2001, total 52 patients were treated with external beam radiotherapy and HDR brachytherapy (Microselectron, Nucletron). During six to seven times of brachytherapy, all patients had three treatment plans. From the orthogonal radiographs, we measured the following variables; height from upper border of pubic bone to os (HPO), distance from sacral promontory to tip of tandem (DST), distance from coccyx to os (DCO), distance from tip of right ovoid to os (DRO), distance from tip of left ovoid to os (DLO), and distance from center of the first tandem source to ovoid (DTO). To evaluate the reproducibility of applicator position, it was calculated the standard deviation of differences between three insertions for the 7 parameters in each patient.
Results : The ranges of standard deviations of interfractional differences for the variables were as follows. 1)HPO : 2)DST : 3)DCO : 4)DRO : 5)DLO : 6) DTO
Conclusions : There was some change in applicator position on repeated implants in our study. But variation of the interfractional differences was minimal; in all parameters, there were less than 1 cm. We are continued to try for reducing the geometric variation between each procedure.
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