The role of computers in radiation therapy: analysis of clinical radiotherapy data

Modern computers are powerful tools for the study of tumor and normal tissue response to various radiation treatment regimens. Computers aid in the development of mathematical models which combine well known radiobiological principles in complex ways to predict treatment results. These predictions may be useful guides to the development of hypotheses for clinical testing. Computers make possible the application of sophisticated statistical techniques to the retrospective analysis of clinical data. For both the predictive models and the analytical methods the importance of the underlying assumptions rather than the computational techniques must be emphasized.