Acute Genitourinary Toxicity after Real-time Planning High Dose Rate (HDR) Brachytherapy for Prostate Cancer: Comparison of the Incidence of Grade 2 or Worse Acute GU Toxicity between Intra-operative Real-time and Post-operative CT-based Planning

Abstract

HDR brachytherapy is one of the effective approaches for safely delivering greater doses to the target, and has been used as a boost to EBRT for localized prostate cancer. We have reported the existence of a correlation between the severity of acute GU toxicity and the urethral dose in HDR brachytherapy using post-operative CT-based planning (Akimoto T et al., IJROBP 63, 2005 and IJROBP 64, 2005), and that the use of anatomy-based inverse optimization (IO) was associated with reduced incidence of grade 2 or worse acute GU toxicity compared to that of geometrical optimization, consistent with a reduction of the urethral dose (Akimoto T et al.