Conveners
Applications: 1
- Ralf Hendrik Menk (Elettra Sincrotrone Trieste)
Applications: 2
- Renata Longo (UNIVERSITY OF TRIESTE & INFN)
Applications: 3
- Cinzia Da Via (University of Manchester (GB))
Applications: 4
- Seppo Nenonen
Applications: 5
- Nicolo Cartiglia (INFN Torino (IT))
Proton therapy is a type of radiation therapy that causes less treatment-related toxicity than standard X- ray therapy and will be offered to Norwegian cancer patients during 2024. The proton therapy units in Oslo and Bergen will have a unique infrastructure for clinical and preclinical research and, when fully operational, will offer treatment to around 850 patients each year. It is a goal to...
In the past years, advanced techniques have been developed to treat lung cancer using particle therapy. This therapy aimed at delivering a more conformal dose to the tumor while minimizing damage to healthy tissues.
However, treating moving tumors with ion beams remains a significant challenge. In the case of lung cancer, the patient’s respiratory motion can cause inhomogeneities in the dose...
Precise measurement of radiation levels and radiation field characteristics is a major concern in fundamental physics and life-science applications. In the present contribution, we describe a novel instrument which was in particular designed for application in harsh radiation environments, as found for example in ATLAS or, within the MOEDAL experiment, at a distance of ~1 m from the...
Introduction: Cancer treatment with ion-beams is a highly promising radiotherapeutic technique. Compared to the conventionally used photon irradiation, ion beams offer an advantage of concentrating the radiation dose to the tumor and sparing the surrounding healthy tissue. However, in order to use the full potential of ions, an accurate knowledge about the depth at which the ions stop in...
Particle therapy has many advantages over conventional photon therapy, particularly for treating deep-seated solid tumours due to its greater conformal energy deposition achieved in the form of the Bragg peak (BP). Successful treatment with protons and heavy ions depends largely on knowledge of the relative biological effectiveness (RBE) of the radiation produced by primary and secondary...
In Targeted Radionuclide Therapy (TRT), radio tracers having specificity for the tumor to treat are administered to the patient in order to selectively damage diseased cells via the decay radiation of the isotope. However, given their systemic administration, these molecules not only concentrate on the tumor, but also diffuse to healthy tissues which thus receive an unavoidable dose of...
Radiation therapy with ions has been used for cancer treatments showing high dose conformity while sparing surrounding organs at risk and healthy tissue. For such treatments, synchrotrons are used to produce pencil-like ion beams, which are magnetically deflected laterally and modulated in range to cover the entire cancer volume [1]. As the beam extraction is in terms of spills at a fixed beam...
Introduction: Ion beam radiotherapy (IBR) can provide a depth dose distribution with a low dose in the entrance channel and a high dose in the tumor region due to the characteristic peak in the depth-dose curve of ions, called Bragg Peak. This results in a high dose concentration in the tumor and sparing of surrounding organs allowing a more accurate treatment compared to conventional...
The future generation of radiation detectors is more and more demanding on timing performance for a wide range of applications, in particular for time-of-flight (TOF) techniques in PET cameras.
There is in particular a consensus for gathering Europe's multi-disciplinary academic and industrial excellence around the ambitious challenge to develop a 10 ps TOF PET scanner (TOFPET). The goal is...
The CMOS Monolithic Active Pixel Sensors (MAPS) technology combines sensitive volume and front-end readout logic in the same piece of silicon. Invented in the ‘90s as an imaging device, only in the last decade MAPS achieved the radiation tolerance, power consumption and integration time which are required to equip tracking detectors for high-energy physics experiments.
The first example of...
The Artemis I mission of November 22 marks the start of the NASA Artemis program to resume lunar exploration. It launched the Orion spacecraft into cis-lunar space on November 16th 2022 for 25 days before returning to Earth December 11th. During this mission the radiation levels and particle fluxes inside the crew cabin of the (unmanned) Orion spacecraft were measure by the NASA “HERA”...
Over the past twenty-five years, the DAMA/LIBRA experiment has observed an annual modulation signal that is consistent with a dark matter explanation. Unfortunately, in a standard halo scenario, this observation is contradicted by the null-results of numerous experiments utilizing different target materials. In order to perform a true, model-independent investigation of the DAMA/LIBRA result,...
The great interest around the experimental evidence of the FLASH effect has led to an intense research activity on the development of monitoring techniques for charged beams at ultra-high dose rates. FLASH poses an unprecedented challenge since the performances of conventional detectors are usually compromised by non-linear effects due to the very high flux of particles.
The FlashDC (Flash...
In the last decade electron cryo-microscopy (cryoEM) has risen from relative obscurity to being one the most important techniques in structural biology. The rise of cryoEM has been made possible by the introduction of large area direct electron imaging detectors. The higher detective quantum efficiency, (DQE) possible with these is key but also important is ability to take many more images...
Hybrid Pixel Detectors (HPDs) have been widely adopted for diffraction-based modalities in electron microscopy thanks to their high frame rates (> 1 kHz) and large dynamic range. However, they are less suitable for imaging applications because of their poor spatial resolution due to relatively large pixels (≥ 25 μm) and to the multiple scattering of high-energy electrons (> 100 keV) in the...
X-ray observation covering a wide field of view with a high sensitivity is essential in searching for an electromagnetic counterpart of gravitational wave events. A combination of Lobster-eye optics (LEO) and a large-area CMOS sensor is an ideal instrument to achieve this goal. Furthermore, thanks to the light weight of LEO, it can be installed on a small platform such as a CubeSat.
SEAGULL...
Speckle-based imaging (SBI) is an advanced X-ray technique that enables measuring phase and dark-field signals in addition to conventionally accessible absorption signals [1]. SBI uses random modulators such as sandpapers that, placed at a proper propagation distance from the detector, produce a reference speckle pattern. The technique requires the acquisition of two images; the first with the...
Autoradiography, an imaging technique providing high resolution two-dimensional images of radioactive emissions, serves as a critical tool in the detection and monitoring of radioactivity from various samples (e.g., radiopharmaceutical, geological, environmental, etc.). For example, during the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident, phosphor screen autoradiography was employed to...
The basic principles of X-ray image formation in radiography have remained essentially unchanged since Röntgen discovered X-rays over a hundred years ago. The conventional approach relies on X-ray attenuation as the sole source of contrast and uses only ray or geometric optics to describe and interpret image formation. This approach ignores another potentially more useful source of contrast,...
Here we demonstrate high-speed CT down to 200 ms for battery inspection suitable for in-line use in factories. The combination of high-brightness MetalJet x-ray sources combined with high frame rate photon counting detectors enables 3D inspection that can keep up with production lines. CT inspection is a promising approach to improve quality assurance in the fast-growing battery industry,...
Thyroid tumors are relatively rare, but their incidence is steadily increasing in recent times. The goal of preclinical and clinical studies is therefore to find a way to detect and successfully treat this type of cancer early. The main problem is that the current imaging methods don't provide sufficient spatial resolution to reveal the remnants after the chirurgical removal of the gland. Due...
We present the first experimental results of the 4D-PET scanner, a novel system for neurological studies. The 4D-PET detector geometry consists of a cylinder with 20 super-modules.
The attached abstract summarizes the results obtained both at super-module level (experimental validation) and system level (simulated data using the measured performance to model its response).
These results...
Mammography is widely used as a screening procedure for breast cancer. However, its cancer detection sensitivity is limited in patients with dense breast tissue [1]. Molecular breast imaging (MBI) using a pair of planar detector arrays has been shown to have high sensitivity even in dense breast tissue [2]. Nonetheless, long imaging time and radiation dose, that is higher than mammography,...
