Aim: To investigate the impact of tomotherapy on the dose delivered to the lungs and other normal tissues.
Material and methods: From February 2008 to May 2009, 35 patients with stage IIIA/IIIB non-small cell lung cancer were treated with helical tomotherapy at the S. Camillo-Forlanini Hospital. For our study we selected 20 patients who underwent chemotherapy followed by sequential radiotherapy. The planning target volume was delineated using planning CT scan and FDG-PET. The mean prescribed radiation dose was 67.5 Gy delivered in 30 fractions at a dose of 2.25 Gy per fraction.
Results: Median follow-up was 12.3 months. All patients developed acute esophageal toxicity, 15 of RTOG grade 1 and 5 of RTOG grade 2. At first follow-up 15 patients presented stable disease or partial response, 4 patients presented complete response, and 1 patient presented disease progression.
Conclusions: Helical tomotherapy is useful to achieve dose-per-fraction escalation without increasing the treatment-related morbidity. Our results applying dose escalation were encouraging considering that we delivered doses that may be difficult to achieve with 3-dimensional treatments with no excessive complication rates.