We are pleased to inform about the publication of our new article “Radiation-Induced Hypothyroidism in Patients with Oropharyngeal Cancer Treated with IMRT: Independent and External Validation of Five Normal Tissue Complication Probability Models” in the new special issue of Cancers. Main authors of the work, performed in cooperation with scientists from Oncology Center of Radom, Maria Sklodowska-Curie National Research Institute of Oncology (branch in Gliwice) and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, are members of our team – Zuzanna Nowicka MD, Bartłomiej Tomasik MD PhD and Wojciech Fendler MD PhD. The article is a culmination of a student research grant granted to Zuzanna Nowicka by the Medical University of Lodz.
Hypothyroidism is a common complication of therapeutic irradiation in the neck area. Several dose-response models have been proposed to predict its occurrence based on clinical and radiomic features, but they have not been independently compared and validated using external data. Based on the data from 108 patients with oropharyngeal cancer treated with intensity-modulated radiation therapy, we concluded that two of the five evaluated models had satisfactory performance.
Cancers is an open access journal. Since we want our data to be useful for other researchers to create and validate even better models to predict radiation-induced hypothyroidism, we published raw, anonymized data along with the article. We hope that the results will contribute to the improved care of patients treated with radiation therapy in the head and neck area.
