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This textbook captures the 2017 the American Association of Physicists in Medicine(AAPM)Summer School, which provided an intense experience to cover state-of-the-art clinical brachytherapy physics. It has become expected that low-dose-rate (LDR) prostate brachytherapy for early-stage disease can provide 10-year survival rates exceeding 95% with minimal mor- bidities. The convenience of this approach, yet with dwell-time modulation and no residual seed placement, is becoming widespread for high-dose-rate (HDR) prostate brachytherapy. Computerized treatment planning for brachytherapy has largely replaced nomograms and other methods that estimate treatment metrics with- out employing 3D patient-specific imaging. Several methods for dose optimization and treatment plan evalu- ation are now standard-of-care. For brachytherapy using HDR 192Ir sources, advances in the past dozen years have included model-based dose calculation algorithms that evaluate dose while accounting for radiation scatter conditions during treatment and material properties of the patient and brachytherapy applicators. Breast brachytherapy has seen the widespread use of balloon-based brachytherapy applicators in North America and the popularization of catheter-based treatments for accelerated partial breast irradiation (APBI). Treatment of gynecological malignancies has progressed in the past several decades, and 3D image-guided planning is now the standard with greater utilization of MRI. Skin brachytherapy now has many choices for treatment delivery, such as interstitial implantation, surface molds, and collimated applicators. Electronic brachytherapy has been integrated into many of the aforementioned anatomic sites, with special applicators that draw on attributes of the high dose rate of treatment, yet the low energy of their photon emissions. Fur- ther efforts to move beyond the AAPM Task Group-43 dose calculation formalism are intrinsic to intensity- modulated brachytherapy, which contain sources or applicators with collimation or shielding. Brachytherapy now includes emerging technologies, such as focal therapy, 3D printing (additive manufacturing), new in vivo dosimetry techniques, live needle tracking, and robotics. This textbook discusses all those topics and also includes over 100 questions and answers to aid the reader in autodidactic learning based on the 10 chap- ters.

Clinical Brachytherapy Physics, Monograph #38