FALCON (Fellowship in Anatomic DeLineation and CONtouring) is the multifunctional ESTRO platform for contouring and delineation. At ESTRO 2023 in Vienna, ESTRO will be offering 5 different contouring workshops. 

Target Audience

The delineation workshops are aimed at junior clinical or radiation oncologists who want to improve their contouring skills or at more senior specialists who want to refresh and validate their knowledge and skills in this field.

Structure of the Workshop

Each of the workshop sessions last for two hours. The session will cover the following areas:

  • Presentation of the delineation guidelines
  • Comment of participants’ contours and comparison to the reference contours
  • Discussion between participants and experts

Practical Information and Registration

Attendees need to register separately to the contouring workshops. They are not part of the general congress fee.

Workshop participants are required to bring their own computer.  ESTRO is not able to provide any computers for attendees.

FALCON

FALCON workshops have been organised at ESTRO congresses since 2010 and have been growing steadily in popularity.

Attending a FALCON workshop offers the opportunity for individual professionals to:

  • Validate their contouring practice during workshops by comparing them with those from experts and other participants
  • Learn the guidelines and best practices proposed by the experts
  • Discuss with experts and panellists
  • Communicate and use the delineation guidelines to further integrate them into your daily practice

Friday 12 May | 15.30-17.30 (CEST)

Faculty: Thomas Brunner (Austria), Berardino De Bari (Switzerland). 

Summary: SBRT is a quite new therapeutic option in the radical or neoadjuvant approach to locally advanced pancreatic cancer. Aim of this workshop is to present the available evidence on contouring and dosimetric guidelines for target definition and treatment planning for pancreatic SBRT. Chairs and participants will translate theoretical guidelines into a “real-life” clinical case: before the beginning of the course participants will be challenged to contour a typical pre-operative pancreatic cancer case and, during the course, we will discuss the submitted contours and present the proposed guidelines.

Saturday 13 May | 10.30-12.30 (CEST)

Faculty: Silvia Cammelli (Italy), Letizia Cavallini (Italy)

Summary: This is a workshop that aim to explain the contouring guidelines and available litterature data on soft tissue sarcomas. It will focus mainly on soft tissue sarcomas of extremities (the most frequent one) but we will also mention retroperitoneal sarcomas. We will try to translate  theorethical guidelines into a clinical case: before the start of the course participants will be challenged to contour a typical pre-operative soft tissue sarcoma case and during the course, we will discuss the submitted contours.

Saturday 13 May | 14.30-16.30 (CEST)

Faculty: Robert Föster (Germany), Arturo Navarro (Spain)

Summary: This is a beginners course and aims to educate radiation oncologists on the basics of spine SBRT. Primarily, this course is designed as contouring course but we will also discuss the available evidence. Before the start of the course, participants will be challenged to contour a typical spine SBRT case for a patient with spinal metastasis. During the course, we will discuss the submitted contours based on the current guidelines and available literature. Participants will then be given the chance to re-contour the same case applying the information provided during the course. We will then shift towards the postoperative setting. We will first discuss the scenario, guidelines and available literature. Participants will then have the chance to apply the new learnings directly by contouring a typical postoperative spine SBRT case.

Sunday 14 May | 10.30-12.30 (CEST)

Faculty: Henrike Westerveld (The Netherlands), Maximilian Schmid (Austria)

Summary: Vaginal cancer is a rare gynaecological cancer with an annual incidence of 0.8–1.0/100,000. Curative treatment includes external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) and concomitant Cisplatin followed by a brachytherapy boost. During the last decade major improvements in brachytherapy have been found with the introduction of image guided adaptive brachytherapy (IGABT) that takes the initial tumour dimensions as well as the residual tumour at time of brachytherapy into account. The aim of the contouring workshop is to gain knowledge about the use of this common target concept for IGABT in primary vaginal cancer. The workshop will consist of a theoretical lecture including an introduction of the target concept, followed by a contouring exercise where the target concept will be applied in practise.

Sunday 14 May | 14.30-16.30 (CEST)

Faculty: Elizabeth Forde (Ireland), Andrew Hope (Canada)

Summary: This concise, interactive workshop focusses on examining some of the uncertainties we face in treatment planning and delivery.  Using the FALCON EduCase platform, we will consider the impact of delineation uncertainties on plan quality.  This will then be balanced with a discussion of challenging cases we may see as RTTs when performing image matching at the machines incorporating insights from each patient’s treatment plan.