Assessing the quality of brachytherapy related YouTube videos

Patients diagnosed with cancer turn to social media to learn about diagnoses and treatments, but there are concerns of bias and misinformation. Information about brachytherapy on social media has not been evaluated for overall quality. The purpose of this paper is to review YouTube videos on brachytherapy and to analyze their content.

YouTube was queried on June 30, 2025 using keywords prostate brachytherapy, cervical brachytherapy, endometrial brachytherapy, vaginal brachytherapy, skin brachytherapy, breast brachytherapy, HDR brachytherapy, and LDR brachytherapy. Videos were ordered by relevance and the top five videos with criteria of length <16 min were independently analyzed by a radiation oncology attending (brachytherapy expert), radiation oncology resident, and undergraduate student. Discordant answers were reviewed by the radiation oncology attending and resident.

Forty videos across the eight keywords were reviewed with an average of 18,356 views (range: 36-203,131), 216 likes (range: 0-1900), and 15 comments (range: 0-123). There was fair agreement between the reviewers when looking at bias based on Fleiss' kappa κ = 0.378 (95% CI, 0.197-0.559), p < 0.001, however the radiation oncology attending and resident detected more misinformation and bias in the prostate, skin, HDR, and LDR videos than the undergraduate reviewer using Cochran's q test χ2(2) = 12.29, p = 0.002 and χ2(2) = 20.93, p < 0.001 respectively.

Prostate and skin brachytherapy videos have greater frequency of misinformation and/or bias in comparison to gynecologic brachytherapy videos that patients may not readily detect. Increased efforts to create complete, accurate, and unbiased content for brachytherapy patients is warranted.