#22 Brachytherapy Physics (1994 AAPM Summer School)
Author: Jeffrey Williamson et al.ISBN: 9780944838501 ISBN10: 0944838502
Published: 1995 | 715 pp |
OUT OF PRINT
Australasian Physical & Engineering Sciences in Medicine | June 1996
"Brachytherapy, i.e. the treatment of cancer with ionizing radiation from sealed radioactive sources placed in close proximity to the tumour, has enjoyed a world-wide renaissance in recent years, with many Australasian radiotherapy departments participating.. Modern brachytherapy entails substantial investment in sophisticated specialised equipment, and demands a high degree of knowledge and skill from clinical physicists.
"In seeking to develop the requisite expertise, the radiotherapy physicist could not do better than to peruse this book. It contains the lectures presented at the five-day AAPM Summer School held in San Diego in 1994, and aims to be a 'textbook-quality handbook to aid experienced radiation oncology physicists in implementing unfamiliar brachytherapy treatment modalities in their clinics.' It succeeds admirably, providing in more than 700 quarto-sized pages the most comprehensive and up-to-date compilation of information on brachytherapy presently available.
"The 33 chapters, many contributed by the most eminent American brachytherapy physicists, progress through the relevant physics and radiobiology underlying brachytherapy, followed by treatment planning, dose specification and clinical implementation, for manual low dose rate brachytherapy and low, high and pulsed dose rate remote afterloading. Most topics of importance, including e.g. facility design, commissioning, quality assurance and even socioeconomic aspects, are covered.
"As would be expected from its genesis, the book is directed to an American audience, and consistently employs the appealing dose calculation formalism subsequently recommended by AAPM TG43 in 1995, which differs in detail from that usually used in Australasia at present. Apart from extensive discussions in several chapters on how to comply with the U.S. statutory requirements, most of the information presented is directly relevant to the local scene, and some international flavour is added by a chapter on the ICRU recommendations on dose specification.
"The book is essentially an anthology of expert reviews of the various aspects of brachytherapy, arranged in a logical sequence. Thus each chapter is self-contained, with its own useful list of cited literature, and with only occasional references to other chapters. Consequently there is some duplication, and some inconsistency in the values quoted in different chapters for the same quantity. However all chapters adhere to a uniform, attractive format, thereby incorporating some of the virtues of a well-written monograph. A useful index is provided, essential in a publication of this size. While many of the contributions are of a very high standard, the one which impressed me most was Chapter 5 'Quantitative Dosimetry Methods in Brachytherapy' by Jeffrey Williamson and Ali Meigooni. The book is relatively free of errors of a typographical nature, an exception being Chapter 3, in which the curves graphed in fig. 1 are mis-labelled and fig. 9 displays the wrong graphs altogether.
"Although this book contains much information which is available elsewhere in journals and other books, it is a distillation of the more pertinent information from among the vast amount of brachytherapy literature which now exists. By bringing it together under one cover, the authors have provided a highly practical book to which every brachytherapy physicist should have ready access."
Bob Fitchew
Royal Brisbane Hospital