A Phase II Multi-institutional Study Assessing Simultaneous In-field Boost Helical Tomotherapy for 1-3 Brain Metastases

Helical tomotherapy is a novel radiation treatment machine that combines two existing technologies: spiral radiotherapy treatments combined with simultaneous computed tomotherapy imaging of the body. This new machine can potentially allow radiation treatments to be focused more precisely, and delivered more accurately than with existing radiation machines. In this study, helical tomotherapy will be used to provide radiation treatments (whole brain radiotherapy, daily over 10 treatments) that are commonly used to treat cancer metastatic to the brain. In addition, the individual spots of cancer (metastases) in the brain will be treated to a higher dose (approximately 2 times higher) than the dose to the whole brain. The purpose of this study is to determine the effectiveness of whole brain radiation with lesion boosting with the helical tomotherapy machine.