Article Sidebar
Article Details
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Main Article Content
Treatment optimisation using external beam radiation in gynaecological cancers
Abstract
of the treatment. These patients undergo simulation for treatment
planning prior to radiation. Currently the lower extent of the disease
is evaluated by vaginal examination and marked using a lead wire on
the anterior abdominal wall in the pelvic region. A 2 cm margin inferior
to this level is used as the lower border of the treatment field. The suggested modified technique includes the placement of an indigenously
designed perspex vaginal obturator with graduations at 1 cm distance
from its tip. Following vaginal examination the obturator can be inserted
into the vagina and fixed at the predefined length using a fixation device.
The radio-opaque markers can be seen even in the lateral films. Twentyfive consecutive patients underwent the procedure and the differences between the two methods of marking the lower border were calculated. The external lead wire was inferior to the internal obturator in 19 patients (76%) ranging from 0.5 cm to 3 cm (median 1.5 cm, mean 1.37 cm). It was at the same level in 4 patients (16%) and 1 cm superior to the internal obturator in 2 (8%). With the modified technique using the internal obturator application for delineating the lower border of vaginal disease or vault, it was possible to decrease the length of field thereby reducing the chances of treatment-related toxicity, especially groin and vulval reactions, as well as avoiding treatment interruptions.
