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Review
. 2008 Jul;35(7):3127-36.
doi: 10.1118/1.2937440.

The role of photodynamic therapy (PDT) physics

Timothy C Zhu  1 , Jarod C Finlay
Affiliations
Review

The role of photodynamic therapy (PDT) physics

Timothy C Zhu et al. Med Phys. 2008 Jul.

Abstract

Photodynamic therapy (PDT) is an emerging treatment modality that employs the photochemical interaction of three components: light, photosensitizer, and oxygen. Tremendous progress has been made in the last 2 decades in new technical development of all components as well as understanding of the biophysical mechanism of PDT. The authors will review the current state of art in PDT research, with an emphasis in PDT physics. They foresee a merge of current separate areas of research in light production and delivery, PDT dosimetry, multimodality imaging, new photosensitizer development, and PDT biology into interdisciplinary combination of two to three areas. Ultimately, they strongly believe that all these categories of research will be linked to develop an integrated model for real-time dosimetry and treatment planning based on biological response.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Energy level diagram for a typical type II photosensitizer and oxygen. The sensitizer in its ground state (S0) absorbs a photon of light and is excited to its first singlet state (S1). It spontaneously decays to its excited triplet state (T1) via ISC. From T1, energy is transferred to ground state molecular oxygen (3O2), creating reactive singlet oxygen (1O2).
Figure 2
Figure 2
Diagram illustrating the progress of PDT development from a set of disparate fields (top row) to a collaborative effort unifying the contributions of biologists, chemists, physicists, and engineers. The second row illustrates the current state of art of research and represents integration of two separate fields. The third row illustrates the future research direction and the fourth row is the ultimate integration of all disparate fields. See text for a complete description.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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