Speaker
Valentina Conti
(INFN Mailand)
Description
Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) is a therapeutic technique exploiting
the release of dose inside the tumour cell after a fission of a 10B nucleus
following the capture of a thermal neutron. BNCT could be the treatment for
extended tumours (liver, stomach, lung), radio-resistant ones (melanoma)
or tumours surrounded by vital organs (brain). The application of BNCT
requires a high thermal neutron flux (>5×10 8 n cm−2s−1) with the
correct energy spectrum (neutron energy <10 keV), two requirements that
for the moment are fulfilled only by nuclear reactors. Several collaborations
(among them the INFN PhoNeS project) are trying to produce such a
neutron beam with standard radiotherapy Linacs, maximizing with a
dedicated photo-neutron converter the neutrons produced by Giant Dipole
Resonance by a high energy (>8 MeV) photon beam. In this framework, we
have developed a real time detector to measure the thermal neutron time of
flight to compute the flux and the energy spectrum. Given the pulsed
nature of Linac beams, the detector is a single neutron counting system
made of a scintillator detecting the photon emitted after the neutron
capture by the hydrogen nuclei. The scintillator signal is sampled by a
dedicated FPGA clock thus obtaining the exact arrival time of the neutron
itself. The paper will present the detector and its electronics, the feasibility
measurements with a Varian Clinac 1800 and the development status of
the final 2D dosimeter.
Author
Valentina Conti
(INFN Mailand)
