Late rectal bleeding after conformal radiotherapy of prostate cancer (II): volume effects and dose–volume histograms

Late rectal bleeding is a potentially dose limiting complication of three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy (3D-CRT) for prostate cancer. The frequency of late rectal bleeding has been shown to increase as the prescription dose rises above 70 Gy. The purpose of this study is to identify features of the cumulative dose-volume histogram (DVH) for the rectal wall that correlate with late rectal bleeding after 3D-CRT for prostate cancer.Follow-up...