Investigation into Delivered Doses for Hepatocellular Carcinoma Patients Treated with Concurrent Sorafenib and Stereotactic-Body Radiotherapy (SBRT)

A previous Phase I study for advanced hepatocellular carcinoma combining SBRT with the targeted therapy Sorafenib resulted in dose-limiting normal tissue toxicities. Some of these patients also exhibited large shrinkages in the liver volume after only one week of treatment. Toxicity can arise from multiple contributing factors such as the underlying patient biology, synergistic effects of combined therapies, or radiation technique. Studies have shown delivered SBRT doses to normal tissues can vary substantially compared to planned doses, which can confound interpretation of clinical outcomes. Therefore, delivered doses for this patient cohort were assessed to potentially improve the correlation of dose to toxicity outcomes.