It is a very special honour for me to be able to present this handbook of medical oncology, which under diverse headings and origins covers such a vast spectrum of experience. I be lieve the reader will be struck in particular by the impressive volume of information available, especially with regard to childhood tumours, which represent, today, an immense "lab oratory of hope". It is in this very field that we oncologists have been able to obtain the most consoling results in recent years. I feel sure that all those who read these chapters will find that their oncological competence is enriched and also in a certain sense that their wish to contribute to progress in can cer research and treatment has been renewed. In conclusion, my most heartfelt congratulations go to the authors for the excellent job they have done, as well as my ad miration for having been able to concentrate so much pre cious and innovative information into so little space. Umberto Veronesi Preface Since 1976, the VICC has been holding chemotherapy courses in all parts of the world, excluding North America and Australia. The Manual of Cancer Chemotherapy, origi nally devised as a didactic tool to be used by course partici pants, expanded itself in the successive editions to a compre hensive, although schematic, textbook of medical oncology.

Given an initial orbit and a set of other orbits of interest, the lowest change in velocity "path" between them is of high value. Software was developed to visualize the change in velocity required from a user defined window of burn to a user defined window of intercept. The time between burn and intercept is unrestricted. Multiple intercepts require searching an n solution space, research then is focused on ways to pick optimal choices without fully calculating out the cost of doing all possible combinations. Some code was translated from BASIC and teh rest was newly develooped in MATLAB. The code was validated using orbits with known intercept solutions.