Helical Tomotherapy: A Fascinating Technological Concept that has Matured into Clinical Reality

www.tcrt.org For the past seven years Technology in Cancer Research and Treatment has regularly introduced readers to important technological innovations in cancer medicine. TCRT hosted some of the earliest preclinical and clinical papers on helical tomotherapy, a technology that has since then proven itself as an in-valuable modality for the treatment of malignant disease. Helical tomotherapy represents one of the earliest innovations in the presently burgeoning field of image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT). The unique design of helical tomother-apy as a hybrid between a helical CT scanner and a linear accelerator made it a natural for image-guided radiotherapy. From its inception, helical tomotherapy was fashioned as a radiation therapy delivery unit that would provide intensity modulation as opposed to a standard linear accelerator that was modified to offer this. Thus, some might consider helical tomotherapy to be the prototype of what has emerged as perhaps the most significant advance in the history of photon-based radiation therapy, image-guided intensity-modulated radiation therap