European Nuclear Physics Conference 2022 (EuNPC 2022)

First steps towards on-the-fly dose reconstruction from in-beam PET activation

26 Oct 2022, 16:25

20m

Classroom 3, Facultad de Ciencias de la Comunicación (University of Santiago de Compostela)

Oral Contribution P8 Nuclear Physics Applications P8 Nuclear Physics Applications

Speaker

Ms ANDREA ESPINOSA RODRÍGUEZ (Grupo de Física Nuclear, EMFTEL & IPARCOS, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, CEI Moncloa, Madrid, Spain)

Description

In-beam Positron Emission Tomography is a promising technique aimed to solve the problem of range verification in proton therapy. In this work we report the first results using a novel in-beam portable PET system that can detect and process on-the-fly the β+ activity produced during and after irradiation.
The specific PET setup consisted of 6 phoswich detector blocks with 338 pixels each, with of 1.55x1.55 x LYSO (7mm)+GSO (8mm) . The system was coupled to a fast data acquisition system able to sustain rates up to 10 Msingles/sec. Two different PMMA targets were irradiated with monoenergetic clinical proton beams at the Quirónsalud proton therapy center. The 3D maps of the activity were reconstructed on-the-fly every 0.5 seconds and with a 0.5 mm spatial resolution. We also assessed the system response to changes in the position and direction of the beam during irradiation.
This validates the experimental setup to be used for in-beam on-the-fly reconstruction of the 3D activity and provides a gold standard to obtain the deposited dose distribution when combined with a fast dose reconstruction method.