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Abstract

Radiotherapy is an effective kind of treatment and there are more than 50% of cancer patients could have a radiotherapeutic indication. Nowadays, radiotherapy techniques become more and more complex with ultra-modern equipment which look like “black box”, so that their management must be more vigilant as that in aeronautical engineering. Mistakes and accidents can happen and have been happened in any radiotherapy department all over the world. According to the ICRP-86 in 2000, accident in radiotherapy is defined as any important discrepancy between the prescribed dose and the received dose (error in patient identification, target volume, fractionation, dose distribution, etc). The AAPM TG35 has divided the Group I risk into Type A (overdose > 25%) which can directly threat the patient’s life, and Type B (overdose > 5 and < 25% or under-dose, leading to unacceptable consequences (increase of complication risks or lack of tumor control efficacy). In this article, we overview some common radiotherapy mistakes and serious accidents that occurred in several institutions in the world, from which we can learn precious experience to “treat safely” for our cancer centers.