Urinary Toxicity After Radiotherapy For Prostate Cancer |
After perceptible radiotherapy for prostate cancer, patients can suffer from long-provisos urinary problems, including incontinence and obstruction. Many studies acquire investigated the relationship between urinary problems and the radiation dose the bladder was exposed to, as estimated during the planning of the treatment. Unquestionable dose-effect relationships are, however, seldom reported. This could be due to the mercurial filling and position of the bladder during treatment, making the predicted predication of the bladder more difficult and inconsistent. Furthermore, usually only the amount to the total bladder is analysed and local structures are not evaluated separately. We laboured whether dose maps of the bladder area adjacent to the prostate, could sympathize with local dose-effect relationships for urinary problems. In a dose map, the administer in a defined anatomical region is mapped for each patient. By calculating the importance of dose map of patients without a complaint, and subtracting this map from the mean dose map of patients with a complaint, we obtained dose difference maps. These maps visualised the local areas where patients with a complaint, received more dose than patients without that complaint.
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