Isotopes in Brachytherapy

Abstract

Brachytherapy refers to radionuclides inserted directly into the tumour.Brachytherapy has become a standard therapy either alone or with external beam radiotherapy for cervical, head and neck, skin, breast, prostate and skin cancers for more than 100 years. Brachytherapy applications began with the use of radium-226 in preloaded applications. Later, the usage of radium was substituted with caesium-137, cobalt-60 as manual after-loading sources for Brachytherapy applications. Awareness of personnel exposures introduced remote after-loading systems. High-intensity sources of iridium-192 and cobalt-60 employed in high dose rate (HDR) brachytherapy instruments has popularized the use of brachytherapy in the last fifty years. As an early adopter of HDR, our institutions has more than four decades of experience in brachytherapy of carcinoma uterine cervix. Recently, manual after-loading Cs-137 Board of Radiation & Isotope Technology (BRIT) applicators were replaced with a 25-channel Saginova HDR instrument with ⁶⁰Co (74GBq, 2Ci). An account of the clinical use of this machine is outlined.