Speaker
Description
The radiotherapeutic method of cancer treatment using precise beam of energetic carbon ions has many advantagescompared to the conventional X-ray radiotherapy. More precise dose delivery to the tumor spares the surrounding healthytissue which makes this method especially suitable for brain cancer treatment. However, this comes with an increasedsensitivity to deformations and displacements of the tissue within the patient body. Since the whole therapeutic process isdivided into sequence of treatment sessions lasting several weeks, the above mentioned changes in the patinet body are ratherprobable to happen due to various reasons including therapy induced healing processeses. This problem is addressedirradiating the tumor with certaing marging of surronding tissue to cover position uncertainty. The other option would beperforming complete treatment replanning after each session which requires repeated diagnostics including CT scans. Thisapproach is inpracticle, expensive and and also risky due to high accumulated dignostic dose.
The aim of this work is to develop method and instrument for online radiation treatment monitoring sensitive to potentialmorphological changes in the patient body affecting the dose delivery precission.
Our team has developed a non-invasive in-vivo treatment monitoring method based on the tracking of charged nuclearfragments produced by interactions of the carbon ions with nuclei of the patient’s body. The measured tracks allow thereconstruction of fragment origins, whose distributions can be compared between different treatment fractions. In thiscomparison, interfractional changes of the patient’s morphology or positioning may be uncovered indicating need fortreatment replanning.
A novel high resolution particle tracking detector system has been developed, calibrated and successfully tested. The detectorconsists of 28 Timepix3 pixel detectors organized in seven units. Each unit consists of two layers (telescope) of two Timepix3chips with single monolithic silicon sensor. All units are synchronized with nanosecond precision. The subpixel resolution ofparticle tracks registered in each layer allows for very precise back projection reconstruction with resolution better than 300μm. This work presents the detector design and its performance testing including the system calibration.
| Workshop topics | Applications |
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