Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Bayesian Mixture Model Relating Dose To Critical Organs And Functional Complication In 3d Conformal Radiation Therapy, Tim Johnson, Jeremy Taylor, Randall K. Ten Haken, Avraham Eisbruch

The University of Michigan Department of Biostatistics Working Paper Series

A goal of radiation therapy is to deliver maximum dose to the target tumor while minimizing complications due to irradiation of critical organs. Technological advances in 3D conformal radiation therapy has allowed great strides in realizing this goal, however complications may still arise. Critical organs may be adjacent to tumors or in the path of the radiation beam. Several mathematical models have been proposed that describe a relationship between dose and observed functional complication, however only a few published studies have successfully fit these models to data using modern statistical methods which make efficient use of the data. One complication …