Author's reply to Ruo Redda MG et al. concerning 'Dosimetric comparison between intensity-modulated radiotherapy and standard wedged tangential technique for whole-breast radiotherapy in Asian women with relatively small breast volumes'

摘要

We appreciate the letter in response to our article [1]. Generally, intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) is thought not to be useful for the target with small volume because the dose inhomogeneity may not be so large. So concerning whole-breast irradiation with small breast volume, the dose inhomogeneity within the breast tissue is thought not to be large even with the standard wedged tangential technique (SWT). However, there is the possibility that IMRT has some dosimetric advantage over SWT even in cases with a small volume. So we conducted this study to verify this. As a result, we demonstrated a dosimetric advantage of tangential-field IMRT (T-IMRT) for dose homogeneity in breast tissue and for the dose to the both lungs even with relatively small-volume breast compared to SWT.