Intraoperative real-time planning prostate brachytherapy: Pre-treatment prostate volume is no longer an exclusion criterion

Purpose: Interstitial brachytherapy using I-125 seeds is routinely offered to patients with localised prostate cancer. There is concern that larger prostate volumes may prove difficult to implant, leading to inadequate dose coverage and more troublesome post-operative symptoms. This has lead to limits being proposed for the size of prostates suitable for treatment. The aim of this study is to demonstrate that the adoption of an intra-operative real-time planning technique allows larger prostates to be implanted to the same quality as smaller ones.