Research team led by CRIG group leader Prof. Liv Veldeman develops innovative protocol for prolonged deep inspiration breath-hold during radiotherapy

Deep inspiration breath-hold is an established technique to reduce the radiation dose on the heart during breast cancer radiotherapy. However, modern breast cancer radiotherapy techniques with lymph node irradiation often require long beam-on times of up to 7 min, requiring multiple, successive deep inspiration breath-holds. This is challenging for patients and associated with important disadvantages such as longer treatment time, fatigue, stress and positioning errors.

Therefore, a research team directed by Prof. Liv Veldeman has developed an easy, cheap, comfortable and efficient protocol to prolong breath-hold, based on high-flow nasal oxygenation. This protocol, optimized on healthy volunteers and validated by breast cancer patients, was able to prolong deep inspiration breath-hold from an average of 59s without support to an average of 3 min 9s without causing discomfort.

This technique increases the comfort and reproducibility of radiotherapy, and is -importantly- feasible for daily use at the radiotherapy center.’
– Dr. Vincent Vakaet, first author on the article the research team published about their findings.

Discover the article via this link.
Read more (in Dutch) via this link (registration needed).