Firstly, the authors are to be congratulated for producing a single reference book that attempts to summarise recent developments in the rapidly advancing area of radiation oncology. More so than most other medical specialties, the practice of radiation oncology continues to evolve as technological and molecular advances surge ahead. While these advances can affect all aspects of clinical practice, the book is divided into four broader sections.
The first, ‘Advances in Imaging and Biologically-Based Treatment Planning’, largely focuses on advances in target delineation and tracking and summarises the state of play in image guidance and functional imaging modalities.
The second section, ‘Advances in Molecular Biology and Targeted therapies’, gives an excellent overview of the current understanding of cellular and molecular radiobiology and how this relates to the exciting new field of targeted therapies. Some of these concepts are further explored using head and neck SCC and malignant gliomas as clinical examples.
Section three, ‘Advances in Treatment Delivery and Planning’, describes some of the newer technologies available for external beam radiation delivery and gives a summary of various models used to calculate normal tissue complication probabilities, as well as potential methods for optimising treatment using biological parameters.
The last section, ‘Clinical Advances’, highlights some of the developments in multi-modality management for several common tumour sites and discusses the role of cyto-protective agents in clinical practice.
These varying subjects will be of interest to both the busy clinician trying to stay abreast of recent technological advances and to more junior trainees who are relatively new to the discipline.
While the book makes good use of multiple diagrams to illustrate particular points, some of these are difficult to interpret in isolation and are often not well explained within the text. Similarly, the average clinician may find it difficult to follow some of the explanations relating to mathematical modelling equations, particularly those describing normal tissue complication probabilities.
Regardless, each section manages to give a good overview of the covered topics and directs the reader to more indepth reviews and articles when appropriate. As with any text that attempts to update advances in a rapidly evolving field, there are some chapters with information that is not necessarily the most up-to-date by the time of publication, particularly those relating to clinical examples.
Despite this, the book will serve as a valuable compact reference that provides a good basis from which to gain a broad understanding of both the technological and clinical advances in radiation oncology that will lead us into the next decade.