Session Item

Voxel based analysis (VBA) is becoming an established analysis tool in radiotherapy, allowing a deeper understanding of how the full, 3-dimensional, dose distribution affects patients’ response to radiation. VBA includes the full, complex, dose distribution in the dose-response analysis, allowing us to move away from traditional approaches which distill the dose down to a single representative value. No prior assumptions are made about anatomical dose dependence; this allows the dose to ‘talk to us’ directly, potentially identifying relationships between local dose and patient outcomes. This approach becomes more crucial as biological insights provide growing evidence pointing to heterogeneity in radiosensitivity of organs. In this presentation, we start from the position that VBA as a methodology has value, discuss best practice methodological approaches of this approach, present a roadmap to fully report and validate results, and discuss the steps to translate VBA results into the clinic for patient benefit.