Interview with Anna Kirby
Chair of the ESTRO 2023 Interdisciplinary Track and President of ESTRO

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Why should you not miss the interdisciplinary track as a professional of radiation oncology?

The interdisciplinary track contains the highlights of the radiation oncology research year. The “Best Papers” from each track will be presented in a session that will cover topics of interdisciplinary relevance from molecular classification, hypoxia and late toxicity modelling through to patient-centred care and artificial intelligence solutions. The “Latest Clinical Trials” session will tell you all you need to know about the latest trial data across a range of tumour sites, helping to underpin practice changes on your return home. I particularly enjoy the late-breaking abstract sessions for truly “hot off the press” data. We had an unprecedented number of exceedingly high quality abstracts submitted for this session but the panel could select only the top six and you will hear in this session late-breaking data on a number of topics from stereotactic body radiotherapy to shared decision-making. In summary, attending these sessions in the interdisciplinary track should bring you right up to date and inspire you to make tweaks, or even step changes, to the way you care for patients.

Which topics received the largest number of abstracts?

We received many high-quality abstracts under the topic headings of “health economics/ health services research” and “education in radiation oncology” each of which has its own proffered paper session. There were also several submissions under the general heading of “patient perspectives” such that this will be included formally as a topic for ESTRO 2024 submissions as well as generating a proffered paper session for 2023. Looking across the submissions to the congress as a whole, we identified three other topics of interdisciplinary interest including biomarkers and prediction models, translational outputs from clinical trials and challenges in global radiation oncology, each of which will have a dedicated proffered paper session. We hope these sessions will provide interest, educational and networking opportunities for healthcare professionals regardless of their specialty.

What makes the interdisciplinary track so special according to you?

The mini-oral sessions have been a huge success providing much more opportunity for discussion and networking. We identified “radiotherapy and the heart” and “patient and public perspective” as two particular hot topics for this year’s mini-oral sessions and we hope these prove fertile ground for sharing data and establishing new connections and collaborations, which indeed is the purpose of the entire interdisciplinary track.

Anna Kirby
Chair of the ESTRO 2023 Interdisciplinary Track
President of ESTRO