Dear Readers,

I heartily welcome you to a new JCB issue 2/2026 (April-June), consisting fifteen manuscripts of varied themes: a letter to the editor, eight clinical papers, two physics contributions, three technical notes, and a case report. Since our founding, we have employed a double-blind peer-review process, with all manuscripts managed by expert brachytherapy specialists and physicists. This maintains high-quality management of the submissions and improves publication quality. And it paid off. As a token of acknowledgment, our impact factor for 2025 improved, reaching 1.5 points! Congratulations to all authors, editors, and reviewers.

The current issue opens with a letter to the editor by Jiayi Chen (China), who comments on our previous submission comparing swallowing function in oral tongue squamous cell carcinoma after upfront brachytherapy followed by IMRT vs. surgery [1]. As he rightly emphasized, the authors should be commended for addressing an often underexplored yet clinically crucial endpoint, i.e., post-treatment swallowing function.

Among the following eight clinical papers, the first focuses on MRI-based image-guided salvage HDR-BT for locally recurrent prostate cancer after initial prostatectomy and EBRT. In this long-term single-institution series by Patricia Willisch et al. (Spain), salvage brachytherapy provided durable local control (53% at 6 years) with acceptable toxicity. In the second clinical paper, Kilaru Sneha et al. (India) posed a question of whether “we can scare the bad scar”, and studied the efficacy of perioperative HDR interstitial BT in keloids. At two years, 87.5% of the scars were “scared off” and did not recur. Please refer to previous data [2]. The third submission from Efstathios T. Detorakis et al. (Greece) reports on ruthenium-based ocular surface BT in incompletely excised conjunctival melanoma and SCC. It may represent an effective sole adjunctive treatment option for selected incompletely excised cases. In the fourth paper, Adam Deja et al. (Poland) also explored ¹⁰⁶Ru BT plaques. They presented unique data on salvage treatment with fractionated SRT after ¹⁰⁶Ru BT failure, which provided excellent local control with acceptable toxicity. Nevertheless, in selected patients with recurrent uveal melanoma, the approach represents an effective, non-invasive alternative to mutilating enucleation.

Another four...


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