ESTRO 2025 Congress Report I RTT track

By the lung focus group

ESTRO 2025 was an exciting and insightful congress, with a packed schedule of talks, posters and symposia that left us rushing across the congress centre between sessions on many occasions. Radiation therapist (RTT) attendees with an interest in lung cancer were spoiled for choice on sessions to attend across all the tracks, but the RTT track itself had much to offer this year.

I had the honour of opening the RTT track with the delivery of a teaching lecture titled ‘Lung Cancer: Pioneering trends and innovations for future practice’. This topic is broad, and I focused on just a few trends that might become more prominent in the future. I elected to discuss the evolution of prescriptions and organs-at-risk in this site, and the expansion of adaptive radiotherapy workflows in the management of patients with lung cancer, all of which are areas of ongoing research.

This lecture was followed immediately by a symposium that was dedicated to adaptive radiotherapy (ART). It was not focused on lung cancer and had application across the spectrum of diseases we treat. Speakers included Bethany Williams (UK), Meegan Shepherd (Australia), Anna Dinkla (The Netherlands), and Stephanie Trösch (Switzerland).  This session highlighted the need for efficiencies in the system and increased education opportunities for RTTs to bring ART closer to a clinical reality for those patients who would benefit.

The focus in this track wasn’t solely on the technical aspects; the patient experience was highlighted by Mark Warren (UK), who presented a qualitative study on lung-cancer patients’ experiences with 4D MR scans. While comfort and environment emerged as key themes, comfort during the scan was not always the patients’ top priority, as some participants reported that they simply wanted to get through the process as quickly as possible.

Another teaching lecture of interest to the lung-cancer community was co-delivered by Dirk Verellen (Belgium) and Ina Nilo (Switzerland). They concentrated on motion management and discussed concepts such as internal target volume, mid-position, mid-ventilation, and robust optimisation.

There was a thoroughly enjoyable and contentious debate on the statement: ‘The need for robust positioning and immobilisation in radiotherapy practice is over!’. This was not targeted exclusively at thoracic cancers, or indeed any specific site. Following passionate, persuasive arguments from both sides, there was agreement at the end that we are not ready to discard our immobilisation devices just yet, but the development of new technologies and approaches is facilitating more comfort-focused positions and less stringent immobilisation requirements.

ESTRO 2025 has left attendees with inspiration that we have brought back to our home institutions, motivation to improve services and questions that will drive forward our research aims for the coming year.

Sarah Barrett

Discipline of Radiation Therapy

Trinity College Dublin

Dublin, Ireland

Email: Barrets7@tcd.ie

X: Sarah_Barrett_1

LinkedIn: Sarah Barrett