INVESTIGATING THE POTENTIAL OF 3-DIMENSIONAL TREATMENT PLANNING

3-D treatment planning has received a great deal of attention in the r adiation therapy community over the last several years. This new techn ology makes use of the continuous improvements in computer hardware an d graphics capabilities, along with major improvements in treatment pl anning software, to provide a fully three dimensional simulation of th e patient, radiation beams, and dose distributions which are used for radiation therapy of various cancers. With these capabilities, the phy sician and treatment planner may now optimize the radiation beams used to treat the patient much more effectively than in the past, when onl y a limited description of the patient, beams, and doses was available . This paper describes several of the new capabilities of these 3-D pl anning systems, some research studies which are currently being perfor med to evaluate the usefulness of the new technology, and finally some of the costs associated with its implementation.