San Antonio(Dec. 14, 2004) – Not taking anything away from Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali, but it certainly has been an “abstract” year for the department of radiation oncology in the School of Medicine.
The department just learned that four abstracts from its faculty and residents are accepted for presentation at the 2005 Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium to be held Jan. 27-29, 2005, in Hollywood, Fla. They cover topics including:
- Image-guided, intensity-modulated radiation therapy for liver cancer;
- Daily ultrasound-based, image-guided, intensity-modulated radiation therapy for pancreatic cancer;
- Preliminary endpoint analysis of daily ultrasound-based, image-guided, intensity- modulated radiation therapy in the treatment of primary cancers of the gallbladder; and
- Plasma fibronectin levels in gastrointestinal cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy
This success follows hard on the heels of 10 abstract presentations by the department in Atlanta, Ga., at the 46th Annual Meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ASTRO) and three presentations at the Radiological Society of North America’s 90th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting in Chicago.
Throw in four presentations at the 10th Annual Meeting of the German Society of Radiation Oncology, two presentations at the 16th Congress of the European Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, five presentations at the American Association of Physicists in Medicine, and five abstracts at the recent San Antonio Cancer Institute (SACI) 13th Annual Cancer Research Symposium, and one arrives at a grand total of 33 abstracts and related presentations to international oncology forums over the past year.
The department is part of the Health Science Center but is physically located at the Burton and Miriam Grossman Cancer Center of the Cancer Therapy and Research Center, 7979 Wurzbach. A walk through the halls of radiation oncology reveals posters on a multitude of research topics by an energetic team of faculty, residents and students.
“Pound for pound, we are as academically productive as any radiation oncology program in the country,” said Health Science Center professor and SACI member Charles R. Thomas Jr., M.D., vice chair of the department under Chairman Terence Herman, M.D. “Despite our relatively small size, which includes only 5.0 FTE (full-time equivalent) academic clinicians, we are doing our best so that even as patients with cancer are more effectively treated with state-of-the-art care, we remain at the forefront of clinical research in our field.”