Carmen Saiz Guisasola, Specialist Physician at HM Hospitales, shared on LinkedIn:
“Transitioning from photon radiotherapy to proton therapy is not simply a technological upgrade-it requires a fundamental shift in mindset.
In photon planning, we often think in terms of managing entrance and exit dose, shaping dose distributions around the target while accepting a certain amount of unavoidable dose beyond it. Proton therapy challenges this paradigm. Instead of planning around dose that passes through the patient, we must think in terms of stopping the beam exactly where the biology demands, leveraging the Bragg peak while carefully managing range uncertainties, tissue heterogeneity, and LET effects.
This shift forces clinicians, physicists, and dosimetrists to rethink target coverage, robustness, and normal tissue sparing from the ground up. Proton therapy is therefore not just a different modality-it is a different way of thinking about radiation delivery.
Adopting protons means moving from controlling where dose goes to controlling precisely where it stops.”
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