Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

Dear Brachytherapy Practitioners,
While welcoming you to a brand new 15^th JCB publishing year, I take the opportunity to invite you all to participate onsite or online in RART 3^rd Edition (Recurrence After Radical Treatment, the Polish Brachytherapy Society congress endorsed by ESTRO), which will take place on March, 24-25, 2023 in Katowice, Poland. For more details, please visit: www.rart.com.pl/en/english/.
The JCB 1/2023 issue contains eleven diverse manuscripts: five clinical papers, a technical note, three physics contributions, and two case reports.
The issue opens with a manuscript by Ken Yoshida et al. (Japan) on the institutional long-term oncological outcome of HDR multicatheter interstitial BT for adjuvant APBI after breast-conserving surgery. Concerning the 2009 GEC-ESTRO risk stratification scheme, they achieved a 10-year LC rate of 100%, 100%, and 91% for patients considered low-, intermediate-, and high-risk, respectively. The second clinical paper, by Stephen Doggett et al. (USA), demonstrated long-term clinical outcomes of non-melanoma skin cancer patients treated with electronic BT. Based on their findings, the treatment was confirmed to be safe and effective, showing an excellent long-term 1.1% LRR in over 180 patients followed-up longer than seven years, causing minimal late toxicities. The following paper from Germany presents the research results on combined CT-guided HDR-BT and transarterial chemoembolization (TACE) with irinotecan-loaded micro-spheres. The combined approach improves LC and PFS in patients with unresectable colorectal liver metastases compared with solitary CT-guided HDR-BT. Such sophisticated treatment schedules provide another pinch of hope for more prolonged survival in this challenging group of patients.
A French group from Lorraine submitted the following manuscript. They assessed prognostic factors of LC and PFS in patients treated for stage T1-2 cervical cancer using utero-vaginal BT following radiochemotherapy. Their results suggest that higher BT doses are necessary for satisfactory LC in stage T2 tumors. At the same time, the lower doses work better in patients with stage T1 tumors, for whom LC is already > 95%. Are you surprised? I advise reading the paper carefully.
Alexandra Stewart et al. (United Kingdom) shared their experience with a series of patients before and after the introduction of inhaled methoxyflurane (IMF). The drug...


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