ESTRO 2025 - Abstract Book

S82

Invited Speaker

ESTRO 2025

Radiotherapy, Radiotherapiegroep, Arnhem, Netherlands

Abstract: This presentation will address some of the challenges a highly automated care environment, as radiotherapy specifically is, will have to face the coming years.

• Online adaptive o Is more personnel intensive. Where do we find the personnel in a society with ever more (elderly) patients and no real increase in workforce. o Online adaptive will change roles in the RT team. Do we need to add other team players? o Do classic risk management strategies (like root cause analysis) still work in an fast changing world. • AI o When delegating tasks to AI, what do we still need to check? o What risks/trouble can you expect when using AI? • Cyber security o Not if but when will you be hacked? Are you ready for the trouble? o Some examples of hospitals experiencing serious cyber trouble. • Software as a medical device o Can we keep up with all the MDR requirements?

4777

Speaker Abstracts Radiation Protection from a clinical perspective reflecting evolving roles, responsibilities and ethical considerations in an increasingly automated environment Mary Coffey Discipline of Radiation Therapy, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Abstract:

Radiation Protection from a clinical perspective reflecting evolving roles, responsibilities and ethical considerations in an increasingly automated environment

It is now an opportune time to review the umbrella approach to radiation protection in the medical use of radiation that links together diagnostic imaging, nuclear medicine and radiotherapy under the generic term of radiology. Current and future radiotherapy practices are now so diverse as to make this approach inadequate. Radiation protection may be seen as somewhat removed from our daily clinical practice but It is important because the legislation, as it is currently applied, impacts directly and indirectly on clinical practice, roles and responsibilities and the content of education programmes that define the competences necessary for quality and safe practice. Current legislation fails to relate to radiotherapy as a continuum from diagnosis to follow up and not a single or discrete number of single events. This has become increasingly evident through participation in recent EU projects under the SAMIRA framework. Radiation protection of the patient in radiotherapy must be considered throughout the pathway and interpreted in the context of delivering the prescribed dose to the treatment volume with minimum dose to the Organs at Risk (OARs). The risk of early and late effects from inadvertent irradiation of normal tissue was referred to in the recent SINFONIA report on Recommendations on diagnostic radiology, nuclear medicine and radiation therapy which considered radiotherapy from the narrow perspective of imaging dose, scattered dose from photon treatments using Hodgkins Lymphoma and brain tumours as examples.