Radiotherapy in muscle-invasive bladder cancer: the latest research progress and clinical application

The role of radiotherapy (RT) in the management of urinary bladder cancer has undergone several alterations along the last decades. Recently, many protocols have been developed supporting the use of multi-modality therapy, and the concept of organ preservation began to be reconsidered. Advances in radiotherapy planning, verification, and delivery provide a method to optimize radiotherapy for bladder cancer and overcome difficulties which have previously limited the success of this treatment. They offer the opportunity to enhance the therapeutic ratio by reducing the volume of normal tissue irradiated and by increasing radiation dose or using more intensive fractionation and synchronous chemotherapy regimes. These techniques have a large potential to improve the therapeutic outcome of bladder cancer. In the near future, it should be possible to offer selected patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer an organ-sparing, yet effective combined-modality treatment. In this review, we aim to present the role of radiotherapy in the management of muscle invasive bladder cancer. Alternative methods of improving treatment accuracy such as helical tomotherapy, adaptive radiotherapy and radiochemotherapy are also discussed.