21st Seminar of HITRIplus - A novel small animal irradiation platform for precision, image-guided proton IMPT delivery: from the initial concept to the first in vivo application

Wednesday 10 Dec 2025, 17:00 → 18:05 Europe/Zurich

ZOOM

Manjit Dosanjh (University of Oxford (GB)), Sandro Rossi (Fondazione CNAO)

Global general scientific seminars linked to the HITRIplus project activities organised in the context of WP2 Networking, Communication, and Dissemination.

To apply for beamtime, please follow the instructions on this page: https://hitriplus.eu/transnational-access/ 

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Katia Parodi, for the LMU SIRMIO team and international collaboration

Katia Parodi is since 2012 full professor and Chair of Medical Physics at the Physics Faculty of the Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich, where she initiated a specialisation curriculum in Medical Physics within the MSc in Physics. She received her PhD in Physics from the University of Dresden, Germany, in 2004, and subsequently pursued postdoctoral research at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA. In 2006, she returned to Germany as a tenured scientist and group leader at the Heidelberg Ion Therapy Centre, obtaining her Habilitation in 2009 from Heidelberg University. 

Her research interests are in high-precision image-guided radiotherapy, with a focus on advanced methods for delivery, imaging and in-vivo monitoring of pre-clinical and clinical ion therapy. For her work, reported in over 300 publications in peer-reviewed journals, she received several recognitions, including the Behnken Berger Award in 2006, the IEEE Bruce Hasegawa Young Investigator Medical Imaging Science Award in 2009, the AAPM John S. Laughlin Young Scientist Award in 2015 and an ERC Consolidator grant in 2016. In 2017-2018, she served as president of the German Society for Medical Physics. She is since 2021 the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Physics in Medicine and Biology and since 2024 an AAPM Fellow. 

17:00 → 17:45 A novel small animal irradiation platform for precision, image-guided proton IMPT delivery: from the initial concept to the first in vivo application

Mouse models are essential for advancing radiobiology research. However, their small size presents challenges for the precise delivery of modern radiation therapy. To address the limited availability of dedicated pre-clinical instrumentation in clinical proton environments, an innovative image-guided proton irradiation platform tailored to small-animal studies was developed as part of the ERC-funded project SIRMIO (Small Animal Proton Irradiator for Research in Molecular Image-guided Radiation Oncology).

The portable SIRMIO system is designed to deliver ~20–50 MeV proton beams degraded from the lowest energy beam of a clinical facility and focused to a ~1 mm lateral size (1 sigma) in air at the isocenter. Multi-field intensity modulated proton treatment (IMPT) is delivered by well-controlled rotation/translation of the anaesthetized animal positioned upright in a custom-made holder, relying on a properly calibrated, in-house developed beam monitor. Treatment planning is performed on a research version of µRayStation using as input validated phase spaces of the SIRMIO pre-clinical beams. On-board pre-treatment imaging is provided by proton radiography with two Timepix3 detectors, while online treatment verification is achieved by a dedicated spherical in-beam positron-emission-tomography system.

After thorough commissioning in different experimental campaigns, the platform has been used in vivo for normal tissue lung toxicity studies in fall 2024 and 2025 at the Danish Centre for Particle Therapy (DCPT). This presentation will outline the system development, key commissioning results, the workflow for in vivo studies, and insights from the first biological experiments, together with the future plans.

Acknowledgement: The presenter would like to thank the current and past LMU SIRMIO team members, as well as the national and international collaborators from DCPT, RaySearch Laboratories, NIRS-QST, Advacam, Vacuumschmelze, Pyramid Technical Consultants, University Roma Tre, University of California, LMU Munich University Hospital, along with colleagues from the other facilities used for testing (CAL, CNAO, HIT, HZB, PSI, RPTC, TPTC) for their support. This work was funded by the European Research Council (grant agreement 725539) and received support from the Bavarian Californian Technology Centre and EU transnational access initiatives (projects INSPIRE and HITRIplus).

Speaker: Katia Parodi (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

17:45 → 18:00 Discussion