The importance of dead material within a tumour on the dynamics in response to radiotherapy.

We present a three phase tumour growth model that accounts for the effects of radiotherapy and use it to investigate how dead material within the tumour may affect the spatio-temporal tumour response dynamics. We use numerical simulation of the model equations to characterise qualitatively different tumour volume dynamics in response to fractionated radiotherapy. We demonstrate examples, and associated parameter values, for which the properties of the dead material significantly alter the observed tumour volume dynamics throughout treatment. These simulations suggest that for some cases it may not be possible to accurately predict radiotherapy response from pre-treatment, gross tumour volume measurements without consideration of the dead material within the tumour.
PMID: 31593931 [PubMed - as supplied by publisher]

Source: Physics in Medicine and Biology - October 7, 2019 Category: Physics Authors: Lewin T, Byrne H, Maini PK, Caudell JJ, Moros EG, Enderling H Tags: Phys Med Biol Source Type: research