[Radiotherapy and chaos theory: the tit bird and the butterfly...]

Although the same simple laws govern cancer outcome (cell division repeated again and again), each tumour has a different outcome before as well as after irradiation therapy. The linear-quadratic radiosensitivity model allows an assessment of tumor sensitivity to radiotherapy. This model presents some limitations in clinical practice because it does not take into account the interactions between tumour cells and non-tumoral bystander cells (such as endothelial cells, fibroblasts, immune cells...) that modulate radiosensitivity and tumor growth dynamics. These interactions can lead to non-linear and complex tumor growth which appears to be random but that is not since there is not so many tumors spontaneously regressing. In this paper we propose to develop a deterministic approach for tumour growth dynamics using chaos theory. Various characteristics of cancer dynamics and tumor radiosensitivity can be explained using mathematical models of competing cell species.