The Treatment Planning MasterClass, that takes place on 21 Ocober 2024 as a hybrid event, builds upon the provided informations and gained knowledge from the preceeding specialised sessions of the Hadron Therapy Workshop that also highlights the underlying requirements imposed on the accelerating and beam delivery systems. Both events are free of charge, and recordings will be made freely available online.
Indeed, hadron therapy (also known as particle therapy) using protons and heavy ion beams offers many advantages by focusing on cancerous tissue whilst sparing healthy tissue around it, making the treatment more effective than any other irradiation treatment.
Due to this, the European Union, through its H2020 research and innovation program, is funding the Heavy Ion Therapy Research Integration (HITRIplus) project which includes the objective of education and training in heavy ion therapy. Following the practices of the HITRIplus Heavy Ion Therapy MasterClass of 17 May 2020, during this Treatement Planning Masterclass adequate time is foreseen for hands-on experiences to ehnance the input provided by the lectures of the preceeding Hadron Therapy Workshop. For that, the matRad open-source toolkit is used which was developed by DKFZ, tailored to research and education requirements in Treatment Planning.
The aim is to acquaint participants with the main principles of Treatment Planning and give them a hands-on experience with the matRad toolkit so that they are able to use it for their research and educational activities. The ambition is also to provide the participants with the necessary background to become tutors themselves (train-the-trainer); thus enabling them to contribute to the particle therapy masterclasses that are organized every year worldwide.
This masterclass is primarily intended towards students and early-stage researchers who show strong promise and interest in becoming part of the heavy ion research community, and it is open to anybody interest, up to professionals. The ultimate goal is to address and support a community that might then optimally exploit and access Europe's heavy ion therapy research infrastructures.
