“THE LOGIC OF THE CLINIC: THE SOURCE OF INNOVATION”
Brescia (Italy), Auditorium di San Barnaba - Friday December 13th, 2024
The 2024 edition of the Brescia Meetings in Radiation Oncology, the fifteenth of a series interrupted only by the Sars-Cov2 epidemic, is a special one.
The impetuous shift toward extreme hypofractionation, the concept of curative treatment not only of the primary tumor, but also of “oligometastatic” patients, promoted by the development of extraordinary technical advances, seems to prelude to a “surgical” use of radiation. At the same time, an increased understanding of the biology of tumors, favored by AI applications, can be exploited to customize treatments (doses, fractionation, volumes) for the individual patients.
All these astonishing achievements changed the face of radiation oncology. But not the soul. Radiation oncologists are clinicians and innovations, to be fruitful, should answer a logical clinical need. In medicine, good science should suggest the way to ameliorate clinical results and should be free from conditionings.
We decided, accordingly, to ask a few questions about these issues to outstanding scientists. The program will be opened by a lecture on scientific misbehavior and closed by a round table discussion on the building of the “new” radiation oncologists, fueled by experts. In between, sessions will be devoted to breast, prostate and lung cancer from the point of view of the clinical exploitation of technical and biological advances. A session will cover the theme of the future of MR-guided radiotherapy.
All these sessions are organized as point-counterpoint debates, not so much diƯerent from those happening every afternoon in the Dabate Courtyard of Sama Monastery in Lhasa, where the wrong answers to logical questions are marked with an applause close to the face of the respondent… but the next afternoon the roles are exchanged. At the end, the winner is the logic.
In our case, the logic of the clinic.
You can check the programme here.
On behalf of the Scientific Secretariat Prof. Stefano Maria Magrini