the Ghost in Cancer: Towards a New Science of Radiation Oncology

Cancer treatment has become extraordinarily precise.We can image tumors in real time, sculpt radiation with millimeter accuracy, and model biology with immense computational power.And yet one question remains:Why do seemingly similar tumors behave so differently?In The Ghost in the Cancer, medical physicist R. Vaitheeswaran proposes that modern oncology may be missing something fundamental: the hidden organizational state that shapes how tumors adapt, resist, and recur. The "ghost" is not mystical. It is the partially observable dynamics of the tumor itself - the unseen structure behind response and resistance.Drawing from radiobiology, systems biology, bioelectricity, imaging physics, active inference, and computational oncology, the book explores a new way of thinking about cancer: not as a static target, but as an evolving adaptive system operating under hidden internal dynamics. At the center of the book is the Active Inference Guided Adaptive Radiotherapy (AIG-ART) framework - an approach to cancer treatment that treats radiotherapy as a continuous process of sensing, inference, prediction, and adaptation, rather than fixed dose delivery alone.

Pagina's: 354, Hardcover, Notion Press