Programme

Overview: Title: The thesis journey: Learning what we don’t know (yet) This symposium explores the RTT PhD journey as a progression from early confidence to long-term sustainability. Initial stages are shaped by cognitive biases, including the Dunning-Kruger effect and impostor syndrome, as RTTs transition into the role of novice researchers. As the journey evolves, speakers reflect on balancing clinical and academic roles, navigating challenges, and gradually integrating research into practice. Through experience, clarity, independence, and new opportunities emerge. The session concludes by addressing leadership, research capacity building, and sustaining academic careers, highlighting how PhD-trained RTTs can shape innovation and contribute uniquely to radiation oncology.

Overview: ESTRO uniquely unites the photon and particle therapy communities, offering a rare setting for true cross-fertilization. Yet, despite sharing many conceptual challenges, both fields often evolve in partial isolation. This session explores how advances, from treatment planning to imaging and adaptation, can be translated across modalities and extend their impact beyond their original context. Progress does not follow a single trajectory: each community has driven distinct developments that remain underexploited by the other. By making these complementarities explicit, the session aims to foster a more integrated perspective—where radiotherapy advances not in isolated islands, but through deliberate exchange.

Overview: Immuno-radiotherapy in the personalised oncology era: A promising strategy for cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma (cSCC)Immuno-radiotherapy, the combination of radiotherapy with immune checkpoint inhibitors, is an emerging treatment strategy for cSCC in the personalised oncology era. CSCC is highly immunogenic due to its high tumour mutational burden. Radiotherapy can enhance anti-tumour immunity by increasing tumour antigen release, promoting T-cell activation, and potentially inducing systemic responses such as the abscopal effect. This combined approach may improve outcomes in patients with unresectable, locally advanced, or metastatic disease. However, robust clinical evidence is still limited, optimal sequencing and dosing remain unclear, and combination therapy may increase toxicity and healthcare costs. Further clinical trials and biomarker-driven patient selection are needed. This joint session is intended to discuss Pros and Cons of the concept among experts from both radio- (ESTRO) and dermatooncology (EADO).

Overview: Radiotherapy quality assurance is not a bureaucratic checkbox — it is a scientific necessity. Any clinical trial with a radiotherapy component stands or falls on the rigour of its RTQA. This joint ESTRO-EORTC symposium makes that case compellingly, exploring why RTQA must be embedded in all trials, how protocols can be harmonised globally, and how value assessment frameworks can strengthen the evidence base for radiotherapy. Drawing on decades of trial experience, the session offers both the rationale and the practical tools to raise the bar in radiotherapy trial design.

Overview: AI tools in radiation oncology are rapidly evolving, with growing clinical deployment across imaging, planning, and decision support. However, their use is now closely tied to compliance with increasingly strict regulatory frameworks such as the EU AI Act, EU Medical Device Regulation (MDR), as well as FDA guidelines further afield. This session will focus on the regulatory landscape for AI in radiotherapy, with emphasis on what clinical physicists need to know to ensure quality and compliance. Topics include risk classification, clinical evidence requirements, post-market surveillance, and the role of physicists in supporting conformity assessments. The goal is to provide attendees with a clear understanding of how QA intersects with legal and safety obligations, and what actions are needed to ensure that AI systems are fit-for-purpose in a regulated environment.