Michael A Izard

• The University of Sydney

Symptomatic locally advanced skin cancers in frail elderly patients are difficult to treat. Definitive radiotherapy (RT) is an option. Attending for a fully fractionated course of RT can be problematic for patients but also for the families that need to provide transport and care for a traditionally out‐patient service. This article is protected by...

An 11-year-old girl with an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) was referred for Gamma Knife treatment. As this would be the first paediatric treatment in Australia, additional investigations were undertaken into out of field dose to assure the best possible long term outcome for the patient. A phantom was constructed from water equivalent materials t...

Introduction: Fractionated stereotactic radiosurgery (fSRS) is an effective definitive treatment for optic nerve (ON) tumors. It is controversial whether treatment to the ON requires attention to the position of the eye as some consider the movement to be negligible. We investigated in four patients to establish whether there is clinically signific...

Ga prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) PET/CT is a relatively new and highly sensitive imaging modality used in staging metastatic prostate cancer. We report a case of a 65-year-old man with newly diagnosed prostate carcinoma who had a PSMA PET/CT scan for staging of his disease. A PSMA-avid right pelvic mass was identified anterior to the sa...

Ga-prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) PET/CT imaging is a relatively new imaging technique used to evaluate the extent of disease in prostate carcinoma. Various other neoplasms may also express PSMA and show uptake on PSMA PET/CT scan. We report a case of a 62-year-old man who had a PSMA PET/CT scan for restaging of prostate carcinoma. A PSM...

Intraoral and external electron shields used in radiotherapy are designed to minimize radiation exposure to non-treatment tissue. Sites where shields are used include but are not limited to, the treatment of lips, cheeks and ears whilst shielding the underlying oral cavity, tongue, gingival or temporal region. A commonly known and published effect,...

We performed the first comprehensive, population-based brachytherapy (BT) Patterns of Care Study in the Australian setting. Herein we report on prostate BT and assess the technical quality of BT practice, focusing on whether a caseload effect could be identified in New South Wales (NSW). Site visits were made to all radiation oncology departments i...

To evaluate whether nadir prostate-specific antigen (nPSA), time to nPSA (TnPSA), and nPSA 3-years post-treatment are prognostic for prostate cancer (PC) in patients treated with temporary brachytherapy plus external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) and hormonal manipulation. We retrospectively analyzed our database of 253 patients with Stage T1-T3 N0...

An 83-year-old woman developed pituitary metastasis while being treated for metastatic breast cancer. She presented with visual disturbance and headache followed by thirst, nocturia and polyuria. A visual field defect was present. MRI revealed a sellar mass consistent with metastasis to the pituitary gland. She was successfully treated with radioth...

Purpose: We report the long-term outcomes of pulse-dose rate (PDR) brachytherapy used in a nonstandard style (pseudo-PDR) with an high-dose rate brachytherapy technique in conjunction with external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) and hormonal manipulation on prostate cancer (PC). Methods and materials: We treated 253 patients with Stage T1-T3 N0M0 PC,...

Brain metastasis is common in patients with melanoma and represents a significant cause of morbidity and mortality. There have been no specific randomized trials for patients with melanoma brain metastasis, so treatment is based on management of brain metastasis in general and requires multidisciplinary expertise including radiation oncology, neuro...

To evaluate the performance of a diode array in the routine verification of planned dose to points inside the rectum from prostate high dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy using a real-time planning system. A dosimetric study involving 28 patients was undertaken where measured doses received during treatment were compared to those calculated by the treat...

To present preliminary outcomes of pulsed dose rate brachytherapy (PDR-BT), external beam radiotherapy (EBRT), and hormonal manipulation, for prostate cancer. Between December 1999 and January 2005, 165 consecutive patients with Stage T1-T3, N0, M0 prostate cancer were treated. Hormones were used in every patient. Median follow-up was 36 months. Ri...

Prostate cancer is now the commonest cancer diagnosed in Australia. In 2005 there were 5913 men diagnosed with prostate cancer in New South Wales alone (31% of male cancers; 17% of all cancers). However, that year there were only 980 deaths from prostate cancer in NSW, and so prostate cancer dropped to be the fourth commonest cause of cancer death,...

Dermatomyositis is associated with malignancy in approximately 20-25% of cases. The most common associated cancers are ovarian, lung, pancreatic, stomach, colon and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Nasopharyngeal cancer is not common in the Caucasian population; however, there is a much higher incidence in Asian patients. Radiotherapy is the mainstay of tre...

To test the hypothesis that metastatic cervical lymph nodes arising from nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) are more readily controlled with radiotherapy than comparable nodes from squamous cell carcinomas of other head and neck sites (SCC). One hundred four NPC patients with metastatic cervical nodes (mean size of the largest node equals 4.1 cm) were...

Thirty Australian and New Zealand Radiation Oncology registrars, who were preparing for their final qualifying examinations, were surveyed about their attitudes to their training programmes. While two (7%) indicated that they had no structured tuition whatsoever, the majority 19 (63%) received on average 1-2h per week, which was much less than thei...