Advanced radiation treatment planning and delivery approaches for treatment of lung cancer

Great technologic progress has been made in the last decade in the radiation treatment of lung cancer. In particular, the widespread use of 3D conformal therapy has the potential to escalate the dose to the tumor while sparing dose to normal tissue. Current technology, however, has yet to impact local control and survival. It could be hypothesized that this is due to geographic misses because of poor target definition, movement of the tumor due to respiration, and dose/fractionation levels. Several emerging technologies that are described in this article have the potential to address these problems, with results expected in the near future. The technical delivery of radiation has not reached its limit.