The Workshop aims to encourage discussions and interactions between participants from a variety of scientific disciplines. It represents an occasion for physicists, engineers, material science experts, biologists and medical doctors to get together and discuss global strategies for effective knowledge sharing and collaboration. Its goal is to contribute to improving health-care quality offered to the Southern European and Mediterranean area inhabitants by supporting, implementing and evaluating innovative approaches to patient care. Last but not least it strives to raise public awareness, define common goals and ultimately devise a pathway for better performance in the general health-care context. Some of the scientific challenges are described in brief below.
Over the recent decades, many important developments have been achieved on either basic physics principles or on the tools developed to conduct physics research. State-of-the-art techniques borrowed from particle physics accelerators and detectors are increasingly used in the medical field. Notable examples are diagnostic and therapeutic techniques such as particle therapy or innovations in space and material sciences. The high potential of enabling technologies developed for particle physics detectors constitutes a major investigating tool for physicists, biologists and medical professionals with a high impact on future healthcare systems. Impressive progress has been made and is also expected in detection techniques for the large and challenging physics experiments of the future, and particularly in High Energy Physics with the Large Hadron Collider program at CERN (LHC), astrophysics instrumentation for the large telescopes or space physics, structure of matter, evolution of the Universe at the -currently under construction- FAIR accelerator at GSI etc.
Particle therapy has become more feasible with better access to appropriate cyclotrons. The subsequent availability of larger cyclotrons, and synchrotron methods of acceleration, allowed the more attractive prospect of using far higher proton energies, with beam penetration to clinically relevant depths, and later heavier ions, for radiotherapy. It is interesting to notice that these developments cover all the technologies used in breakthrough imaging technologies: detector materials (scintillating or direct conversion crystals), photo-detectors, highly integrated low noise front end electronics, signal processing, etc. All these applications are spin-offs from research projects achieved by multidisciplinary teams of scientists in partnership with medical doctors and industry, developing new instrumentation and techniques.
Space radiation studies need particle beams at very high energy: at the moment NASA is using the facilities at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and ESA the GSI facilities. At CERN a task force is studying feasibility of setting up a facility providing particle beams of different types and energies to external users interested in radiobiology and detector development.
The first edition of the workshop will follow a traditional format with talks and discussions about the afore mentioned issues. However, in such a fast-paced scientific research environment, the workshop aims to make a significant contribution in the long term. Therefore, its vision is to:
-
Foster highly innovative and potentially transformational research that will achieve international impact in the envisaged scientific fields and will boost capabilities and knowledge in the Mediterranean basin and beyond.
-
Link existing research strengths and help create critical mass with new capacity for interdisciplinary, collaborative approaches to address challenging and significant research problems in health physics and technology.
-
Develop relationships and build new networks with major national and international research centres and to improve education in the relevant fields.
-
Attract and retain researchers of high national and international standing, from Greece and abroad, as well as the most promising research students.
-
Serve as a point of reference and interaction with other European and International workshops on relevant scientific disciplines.
Gathering researchers from all over Europe at the unique and inspiring setting of the island of Crete can be used to define common goals in this direction, with the ultimate objective to use this diverse cultural background as the basis for innovation and vision.
