Prediction of therapeutic response to radiotherapy in metastatic cervical lymph nodes

In radiotherapy, if it would be possible to predict tumor shrinkage during the course of radiotherapy, this information would be useful for making treatment plan for more safety and effective treatment. The authors have developed a novel computational simulation method to calculate changes in tumor volume during the treatment period. In this work we aimed to investigate feasibility of clinical application of our simulation method for prediction of therapeutic response to radiotherapy. As a result, it was found that the tumor volumes at the end of the treatment in six cases were able to be predicted with the error of 10% with the observation of first three weeks. (author)