Programme

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: This joint ESTRO-AAPM session will highlight emerging strategies for real-time intra-fraction adaptation and their potential to improve precision in radiation therapy delivery. Drawing on lessons from tracking-enabled platforms such as Vero, the session will explore how motion management has evolved from marker-based to marker-free approaches across moving targets including lung, liver, and pancreas. It will then address key enabling technologies, including real-time segmentation and quality assurance of auto-generated structures, as well as clinically available and emerging real-time tracking solutions, spanning geometry-guided and dose-guided approaches, advanced techniques to account for deformation, AI-based methods and quality assurance consideration. Finally, the session will discuss real-time dose reconstruction, covering adaptive dose calculation, dose accumulation across fractions, and the QA and validation challenges that must be addressed for safe clinical implementation.

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: 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.