History
Istanbul University Oncology Institute was founded in 1934 and a German physicist, Professor F Dessauer, who had left his own country for political reasons, was appointed as the first director of this department. A year later, another new radiology unit was opened on the campus at Çapa, a district of Istanbul, as part of the Istanbul Faculty of Medicine. The building that housed this department still forms part of the Istanbul University, Institute of Oncology complex. This contained the most modern radiotherapy machines of their day, consisting of two superficial treatment units of 60 kV and 100 kV, and two deep treatment units of 200 kV and 400 kV. A contact treatment machine, dosimeters, and 200 mg radium needles were also among the facilities of the department at that time.
In 1935, the radiotherapy team in Istanbul, headed by Professor Dessauer, tried to perform rotational radiotherapy treatment. They used a rotating platform on which patients with head and neck cancers stood and were irradiated. In this way, they hoped to achieve a skin-sparing effect by using multiple-beam entries. The results of this new therapeutic approach were presented at an international meeting in Berlin in 1936.
Radioactive isotope treatments began in Istanbul in 1950 and included the use of phosphorus-32 and iodine-131. The first supervoltage treatment units (cobalt-60) were introduced in Turkey in 1961. A high-dose after-loading brachytherapy machine, only the third of its kind in the world, was established in Istanbul Faculty of Medicine in 1969, containing a 60Co radioactive source. The first megavoltage treatment machine, a Betatron 18 MeV Siemens unit, arrived in 1972, and the first electron and high-energy photon treatments were given at the Istanbul Faculty of Medicine. More linear accelerators and  simulators were obtained after 1976, and were established in Istanbul and other major Turkish cities.
To celebrate the centenary of the discovery of X-rays in 1895, the Istanbul University Institute of Oncology has created a Museum of Radiology. The valuable collection includes items such as Hittorf-Crookes tubes, gas-filled X-ray tubes, Coolidge X-ray tubes, kenetrons, early dosimeters, and ion chambers, early physics equipment, and various parts of the first radiological machines used in the Ottoman period and during the first years of the Republic of Turkey. For instance, what is probably the world's first multileaf collimator, belonging to a 60Co unit (Gammatron I), built in Istanbul in 1955, is displayed in the museum.
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