The advent of modern radiotherapy is a cross disciplinary development between the fields of biomedical engineering, medicine, and the basic sciences which has provided the scientific community with an innovative and continually developing arsenal in the fight against cancer. At the forefront of this battle is the utilization of radiotherapy to treat cancers of different morphological and embryological origins. According to the Royal College of Radiologists, surgery accounts for 49% of successful tumor therapy, while radiotherapy weighs in at an impressive and ever-growing 40%; clearly, the continued research and economic investment in radiotherapy is worthwhile, given the technological complexity of medical physics. The distinct types of radiotherapy treatments converge on a few fundamental goals: killing cancer cells, halting the possible metastasis of cancer cells, sparing healthy tissue from undesirable radioactive damage …show more content…
Further, various clinic pathologic factors will dictate whether a patient will receive treatment prior, during or after surgery, or whether both surgery and radiotherapy is necessary in their personalized cancer treatment. Further, the type of radiation is determined specifically for each patient and tumor. When a patient is given pre-operative radiation therapy, the goal is usually to shrink a tumor so that it can subsequently be removed by surgery. Intraoperative radiation therapy (IORT) is given during the surgical procedure and may fall under two distinct categories: external beam radiation therapy (utilizing photons or electrons) or brachytherapy. Which modality of treatment is best under the given circumstances, as well as how that treatment is delivered to the patient, is something which science and medicine continue to