Advances in Personalized Adaptive Radiotherapy for Solid Tumors

Dear Colleagues,

Adaptive radiotherapy (ART), enabled by advances in onboard imaging, adaptive treatment planning, and radiation delivery techniques, allows radiation treatment to be adapted to the daily anatomy, thereby accommodating anatomical and physiological changes throughout the course of radiotherapy. By delivering highly conformal treatment at each fraction, ART can improve target coverage while reducing radiation exposure and toxicity to healthy tissues. Despite significant technological progress, several challenges remain in ART, including real-time volumetric imaging, accurate dose accumulation, and efficient plan re-optimization. In addition, solid tumors exhibit complex clinical and biological characteristics and dynamic microenvironments, which may result in heterogeneous treatment responses that vary substantially among patients. Normal tissues may also undergo biological and functional changes during treatment. Furthermore, ART is increasingly being combined with other therapeutic modalities, including chemotherapy, immunotherapy, radiopharmaceutical therapy, and molecularly targeted therapy. These combinations may further influence tumor and normal tissue responses, creating both new challenges and opportunities for adaptive cancer treatment. Incorporating spatially resolved treatment responses into the adaptive treatment process is an important step toward personalized radiotherapy.

This Special Issue aims to highlight recent advances in personalized adaptive radiotherapy for solid tumors. We welcome original research and comprehensive reviews spanning basic, translational, technological, and clinical studies in areas such as medical imaging, radiation dosimetry, treatment planning, treatment response assessment, and predictive modeling to support adaptive radiotherapy. Particular emphasis will be placed on Omics and innovative approaches that integrate anatomical, functional, biological, and treatment-response information to enable personalized and response-guided adaptive radiotherapy.

We welcome contributions on topics related to personalized and treatment response-guided ART, including, but not limited to, the following:

• Anatomical and functional imaging and their applications in ART;
• Measurement, modeling, and prediction of tumor and normal tissue responses;
• Adaptive treatment planning and dosimetry;
• Innovative image registration and dose accumulation;
• Innovative dose enhancement strategies, including the use of nanoparticles and radiopharmaceuticals;
• Quality assurance for ART;
• Imaging biomarkers to enable biologically informed adaptation;
• Radiobiological investigations and modeling;
• Dose painting and personalized dose prescription;
• Integration of multimodality therapy with ART;
• Artificial intelligence for ART;
• Translational and clinical research in ART;
• Emerging concepts and future directions in personalized radiotherapy.

We look forward to receiving high-quality contributions that advance the development and clinical implementation of personalized radiotherapy for solid tumors.

Dr. Hualiang Zhong
Dr. Haidy Gerges Nasief
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Cancers is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2900 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.