Dr. Ten Haken and his colleagues also were among the first to discuss the dosimetric impact of prostate motion due to differential filling of the rectum and bladder, a factor rarely considered at the time. This discovery was followed by more studies and the impact of breathing on the design of treatment, especially for tumors in the lungs and liver. They published these findings, and they learned that treatment teams needed to incorporate patient-specific anatomy and setups certainties and organ motion into the treatment planning process.
This led to a career of integrating these findings into clinical practice, and to the development of phase one dose escalation methodologies. Initially a one-size-fits-all approach was the standard for radiation treatments. But Dr. Ten Haken was the primary innovator for a more customized method, incorporating a dose escalation scheme that led to clinical trials demonstrating the ability to safely deliver higher doses of radiation to tumors in the liver and lung that had been deemed not possible prior to that work.