Tracking tumours: cancer in our sights

Radiotherapy typically takes several weeks. During this time the patient's anatomy may change: breathing or bowel motion causes the tumour to shift and deform in just seconds, the patient's position on the treatment couch differs from day to day, and the tumour can shrink or grow over the course of weeks. These changes can compromise the effectiveness of treatment. This talk will discuss how our research aims at adapting different aspects of the radiotherapy to compensate for anatomical changes.

Modern radiotherapy can be precisely targeted at tumours, but it’s inevitable that there will be some exposure of surrounding tissues to radiation. And those doses can lead to unwanted effects. Would you rather suffer from flatulence or erectile dysfunction? Luckily, using data from clinical trials can help us to understand how different healthy tissues respond to radiation. Using this information allows us to give higher doses to tumours while minimising the long-term risk of side-effects.

Using ultrasound, Emma spends her days shooting sound waves into the body and listening to the echoes. Ultrasound measures how the body and the cancer are responding to treatment. And her work uses it to solve a key puzzle, how to make a finely tuned radiotherapy beam accurately hit cancer cells in an ever-moving and deforming tumour. We use ultrasound to image the human body and help us guide therapy - and can develop smarter therapy that changes according to the signals we can listen to.