Faculty Bibliography

Almost 20 years ago, Emami et al. presented a comprehensive set of dose tolerance limits for normal tissue organs to therapeutic radiation, which has proven essential to the field of radiation oncology. The paradigm of stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) has dramatically different dosing schemes but, to date, there has still been no comprehensive set of SBRT normal organ dose tolerance limits. As an initial step toward that goal, we performed an extensive review of the literature to compare dose limits utilized and reported in existing publications. The impact on dose tolerance limits of some key aspects of the methods and materials of the various authors is discussed. We have organized a table of 500 dose tolerance limits of normal structures for SBRT. We still observed several dose limits that are unknown or not validated. Data for SBRT dose tolerance limits are still preliminary and further clinical trials and validation are required. This manuscript presents an extensive collection of normal organ dose tolerance limits to facilitate both clinical application and further research.

The Stereotactic Alignment for Linear Accelerator (S. A. Linac) system is developed to conveniently improve the alignment accuracy of a conventional linac equipped with stereotactic cones. From the Winston-Lutz test, the SAlinac system performs three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of the quality assurance (QA) ball coordinates with respect to the radiation isocenter, and combines this information with digital images of the laser target to determine the absolute position of the room lasers. A handheld device provides near-real-time repositioning advice to enable the user to align the QA ball and room lasers to within 0.25 mm of the centroid of the radiation isocenter. The results of 37 Winston-Lutz tests over 68 days showed that the median 3D QA ball alignment error was 0.09 mm, and 97% of the time the 3D error was