Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

Dear All,
It is my honor to present you the last issue of the Journal of Contemporary Brachytherapy this year. It closes the fourth year of my service as the Editor-in-Chief. Our collective work of all authors, section editors, reviewers, and Publishing House specialists have led us to this point. The JCB gradually builds up its’ IF and number of citations. We were present at the most important events concerning brachytherapy, including ESTRO2022 Annual Congress (Copenhagen, Denmark), PBS Biannual Meeting (Wroclaw, Poland), and GEC-ESTRO Workshops (Nice, France). Thank you all for sharing your knowledge during these gatherings, always fruitful discussions, and for the time spent in joy and friendship. Such professional socializing is of great value, especially during a time of extremely unstable politics and unfair war conflicts. Hopefully, it is all going to end soon.
The JCB 6/2022 issue contains twelve manuscripts: eight clinical papers, three physics contributions, and a single case report.
Although BT, as a discipline, has an established position in various oncological scenarios, its’ importance is still being neglected, and the BT training process is inadequate. Manon Kissel et al. (France) conveyed a repeated survey among radiation oncology residents. After ten-year gap, despite recent efforts, BT training in France still needs improvements, and the ways of achieving that are discussed.
A German group of specialists performing single fraction-based image-guided HDR-BT of close to renal structures lesions focused on their treatment influence on the extent and rare morphologic changes of radiation-induced nephropathy. Among 35 patients, a decrease in renal function was identified in one case after 12 months, and larger cohorts need to be analyzed to draw firm conclusions on kidney safety. The following paper by a Chinese group from Dalian University assessed the clinical efficacy and safety of so-called ‘stereotactic ablative brachytherapy (SABT)’ for unresectable or inoperable H&N cancers. SABT stands for precise CT-guided technique of permanent implant application along with dedicated 3D-printed individual templates. As claimed, the treatment produced reasonable local control and mild adverse reactions (no grade 3 or more). The authors evaluated it as a safe, feasible, and minimally invasive approach. Another group from China (Peking) submitted its’ results on a deep learning-based two-step OAR auto-segmentation...


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