[Radiotherapy at the turn of the millennium]

The radiotherapy of the turn of the millenium has arisen as a result of continuous technical development, having taken place during the past 100 years. In the first 60 years it was, above all, a development of apperatures in the field of mechanics and radiophysics, originating a succession of different generations of megavolttherapy from the orthovolt one, radium being substituted in brachytherapy by surrogating nuclides. The motives for the development in the last 40 years have been microelectronics, computer technology and informatics. Owing to them, it became possible the digitalization of CT scans and CT assisted 3 dimension radiotherapy planningsystem. At the turn of the millenium, megavolttherapy and brachytherapy can only be remoted if computerized and perhaps with record and verify system a built-in on-line with portal imaging. In radiotherapy, technical development can motivate better therapeutic results only if treatments are given on tumorbiological-radiobiological basis which can essentially determine the totaldose and fractiondoses of radiotherapy and the total time and volume of radiation. A further task for radiotherapy is to examine how tumorregression can be influenced by alterated fractionation, by hyperthermia, by the oxigenization of the target volume eventually by chemotherapy and radioprotection of sourranding tissues.