The ability to provide the patient with a valid explanation of this phenomenon can help relieve treatment-related anxiety.
"Published work has shown that if a patient doesn't see light flashes during radiotherapy, there is a higher chance of expecting vision loss after irradiation," says Tendler. The method could help determine if any light was actually generated to potentially relate this to predicted vision loss as well as provide information about long-term visual outcome following radiotherapy.
The team's next steps are to correlate how recorded ocular Cherenkov light and delivered dose can provide information about long-term visual outcome, and to develop the tool to use in prediction and measurement of eye dose.

Irwin Tendler, MEng, is a biomedical engineering and medical physics PhD candidate at Dartmouth's Thayer School of Engineering studying under Drs. David Gladstone, Brian Pogue, and Lesley Jarvis. His research interests include development of optical imaging-based medical devices to improve safety and efficacy of radiotherapy.
Lesley Jarvis, MD, PhD, is a radiation oncologist and member of the Translational Engineering in Cancer research program at Dartmouth's and Dartmouth-Hitchcock's Norris Cotton Cancer Center, and Associate Professor of Medicine at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine.


About Norris Cotton Cancer Center at Dartmouth-Hitchcock
Norris Cotton Cancer Center combines advanced cancer research at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine with patient-centered cancer care provided at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, NH, at Dartmouth-Hitchcock regional locations in Manchester, Nashua and Keene, NH, and St. Johnsbury, VT, and at partner hospitals throughout New Hampshire and Vermont. It is one of 51 centers nationwide to earn the National Cancer Institute's "Comprehensive Cancer Center" designation.

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