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Article Analysis Part 1: Trade Magazine

In this assignment we had to review articles that were from a trade magazine and from a

peer reviewed journal. I noticed many differences between the two different types of

publications. The first article I will be using is from Radiology Today. This website has a lot of

links to its social media page and other advertisements. The other journal comes from Radiation

Oncology and that website has no advertisements and is more of what you would expect to see

from a medical journal. Just from my first impression of the websites, I would assume that the

journal from Radiation Oncology would be better for research. During this analysis I will review

both journals and identify the strengths and weaknesses of each.

The first article I read was a trade article from Radiology Today titled “Minimizing Errors

in Radiation Therapy” by Beth W. Orenstein. In this article she talks about how the field is

becoming more complicated, when it comes to treatment planning, and that it is important to

report any events so that we can learn from them. She describes how technology is changing so

rapidly and that the information is hard to absorb especially if continuing education opportunities

are not available to dosimetrists. The New York Times article from January 2010 is referenced a

lot by this author to point out the two patients who died from errors in radiation treatment. She

also talks about how patients are being educated in certain medical fields and that near misses are

being reported to patient safety task groups.1

As a working dosimetrist, I do not think that this article would be very helpful to other

medical dosimetrists. It will remind anyone working in a radiation oncology department to

report their near misses and safety events regularly. This is something that is drilled into our
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heads almost daily at my clinic so there wasn’t much to learn from this article. I would classify

this more as an easy read rather than somewhere I would pull information from for research.

On the website for the article, the sources are not listed. The author is also a freelance

medical writer so I would assume that her expertise in radiation oncology is very limited. She

was not very organized with her thoughts and used a lot of quotes from other interviews to fill in

some relevant information. The New York Times article was mentioned many times, but she did

not provide a summary when she first mentioned this article.1

Finally, the article had some strengths and weaknesses. I think the only strength to this

article is that the topic is very important in the medical dosimetry community. It was also very

easy to read and I would probably read this for pleasure if I was not in the medical field. The

biggest weakness of this article was that most of the information came from the quoted material

and not any fact-based research.

Overall, I think that this trade article would not be very helpful during research. It was

kind of distracting how she jumped from topic to topic with very little information other than

opinions. This article did highlight the need for better education in a growing field but no

evidence based information was provided.

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Sources

1. Orenstein BW. Minimizing Errors in Radiation Therapy. Radiology Today.

http://www.radiologytoday.net/archive/rt0111p30.shtml. Accessed January 29, 2018.

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Article Analysis Part 2: Professional Journal

The second article that I chose to analyze comes from Radiation Oncology. It does

mirror the same topic as the first article but does go more in depth about potential errors in

radiation therapy specifically re-planning criteria for head and neck IMRT patients. This article

uses a much more formal structure than the trade journal and is clearly written for a specific

audience. The peer reviewed article is titled “The frequency of re-planning and its variability

dependent on the modification of the re-planning criteria and IGRT correction strategy in head

and neck IMRT.”

In their study, the researchers used CT data sets of six consecutively treated head and

neck cancer patients to analyze three types of IGRT correction strategies to correct positioning

errors while under treatment. The journal describes the three types, the first strategy to derive a

target point correction using rigid image registration with a large registration box. The second

type is very similar except the registration box is limited to a smaller size so that it can be

focused on specific patient structures for alignment. The third method uses a correction from a

displacement vector field which basically fit a rigid body transformation to the vectors of the

displacement vector field. These methods are explained further in the journal in detail in the

methods section of the article along with information dose prescriptions, target volumes,

simulation, and all other aspects of their procedure.2

The researchers then tested re-calculations on each CT after these strategies were applied.

The results of their study were clearly presented in tables and figures. The results of the study

showed that the dosimetric impact of the three different target point corrections on certain

volumes of interest were very small. Statistical analysis could not show a significant difference
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on dose to the spinal cord. The researchers also concluded that there is a need for increased

adapted re-planning in fractionated radiation therapy for head and neck cancers.2

My overall impression of the study was that it was very useful for this specific issue that

most radiation oncology centers see often. Re-planning of head and neck patients can be very

time consuming and it is interesting to explore new approaches to this problem. Since there were

no clear results on which re-planning method is best overall, the researches state that the results

show that more investigation of the criteria of re-planning be carried out in the future.2

When comparing the two different types of articles in this assignment it was easy to see

that the peer reviewed journal gave more information on this specific topic and backed the

information with evidence. This would be the type of source to use in research and you can

easily see the references that they used in their research as well.
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Sources

2. Stoll M, Giske K, Debus J, Bendl R, Stoiber E. The frequency of re-planning and its

variability dependent on the modification of the re-planning criteria and IGRT correction

strategy in head and neck IMRT. Radiation Oncology. 2014;9(1):175. doi:10.1186/1748-

717x-9-175.