From the November 2022 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine

From new systems, to emerging best practices and increasing impact from artificial intelligence, presented in chronological order, here are the ten biggest CT stories of the year from our Daily News online.

Is proton CT superior to conventional CT for planning proton therapy?

Research in January showed that using proton CT instead of X-ray CT for proton therapy planning could spare patients from overexposure to radiation when undergoing multiple scans and may improve the accuracy of the treatment.
Proton therapy manufacturer ProtonVDA and researchers at Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine, Northern Illinois University and Loma Linda University found that proton CT reduced range uncertainties, which could allow radiation oncologists to potentially use smaller margins around tumors and more precisely deliver proton radiation to cancer sites.

The reason for this is because using X-ray CT requires the CT Hounsfield units to be converted into proton relative stopping power (RSP) to calculate proton range in the patient and generate a plan. This leads to uncertainties, which necessitates the need for wider margins. Proton CT directly measures RSP, which decreases uncertainties and may allow for smaller margins.

While small reductions in dose associated with a single scan are not likely to cause harm, the 10- to 100-fold decrease brought on by proton CT could enable scans to be repeated regularly, according to senior author James Welsh, a professor of radiation oncology at Loyola University Stritch School of Medicine.

The findings were published in Medical Physics.

November 2022 Magazine

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