Speaker
Description
Radiotherapy with ion beams is a highly precise cancer treatment modality. As such, its quality might be influenced by even minor anatomical changes within the patient like swellings or tumor shrinkage. Therefore methods to assess the quality of the treatment during the irradiation is of utmost interest.
Contrary to X-ray imaging, methods without exposing the patient to additional radiation dose are attractive. Secondary radiation emerging from the treated patient is a yet unexploited source of potential information.
Our team investigates how far secondary ions, the nuclear fragments of the treatment ion beam, can gain information about the quality of the dose distribution in the patient.
We developed a clinical secondary ion tracking system based on pixelized hybrid semiconductor detectors Timepix, which were developed by the Medipix Collaboration at CERN. The tracker consists of 7 pairs of double-sized Timepix3 detectors.
In 2023 we have started a clinical study called InViMo at the Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy Center (HIT) in Germany. It aims to explore the benefit of nuclear fragment emission tracking from head cancer patients.
In this contribution the clinical ion tracker, together with its integration in the clinical environment, is presented. Moreover, preliminary results from the first patient cohort will be shown.
