In my opinion the ESTRO forum was quite a success.

The ESTRO forum is, in contrast to the other ESTRO meetings, a place to meet for all those involved in radiation oncology - the biologists, the physicists, the radiation therapists and, of course, the medical doctors, the radiation oncologists.

This gives a great opportunity to show to each other what we are doing to improve our way of mutual understanding and of collaboration.

So many of the sessions were done together, for example, a session on breast cancer for radiation therapists, which are our radiotherapy nurses in some countries, in other countries they are well-trained technicians.

But the session was made by their own professional group and by doctors and by physicists and sometimes also by radiobiologists.

Another of the important factors of the ESTRO forum is that we invite our colleagues from outside of Europe.

So we had joint sessions with the Japanese colleagues on proton therapy and heavy particle therapy.

We had a joint session with the colleagues from ASTRO, from America, on oligometastases which was, by the way, an important team at this meeting.

We had a joint session with the Canadian friends and a joint session with the people from Australia and New Zealand.

This time we didn’t have joint sessions with, for example, ALATRO because we cannot fill our entire congress with joint activities.

The theme of oligometastases was very high on this agenda.

We had three sessions dedicated to this.

It’s important to select the patients who have only a little bit of metastatic disease and there is a discussion about how extensive this can be.

How to treat them?

Some treat them just palliatively but a part of those patients when treated with radical intent can survive for many years in a good quality of life.

We have seen many examples of trials run in this field, many of the trials have some shortcomings.

We miss further prospective randomised trials.

We have seen a lot on the possible complications of the treatment but more on technical solutions – how to prevent complications.

So we had very interesting abstracts, very interesting presentations.

One that I would like to highlight is an abstract that was presented on a prospective study comparing high dose external beam radiotherapy with low dose external beam radiotherapy followed by brachytherapy for prostate cancer.

The results were very interesting, showing that the survival without progression of disease is better with combination treatment, so better following brachytherapy, however, without a clear improvement up to now on overall survival and with some more side effects.

So it is still a little bit too early to advise this treatment to all our patients, however, probably we can select a subgroup in which it can be very interesting.

What is next for ESTRO?

We have two upcoming meetings, the numbered meetings, ESTRO 34 will be organised jointly with other cancer societies in the framework of the ECC meeting in Vienna at the end of September.

And ESTRO 35, our own meeting, will be hosted by the city of Torino at the end of April next year, early May 2016.

The theme of the meeting in Torino is being discussed at this very moment so it is not sure but numbered meetings always do have a close interaction with other oncological societies with whom we collaborate.

So we often set up joint activities with, for example, the European Society for Radiology, with the European Society for Nuclear Medicine, often with the societies for breast cancer or for lung cancer or for gastroenterological cancer or other tumour-specific sites.