A major issue of modern radiotherapy is the delivery of
sufficiently high dose to the target, whereas the exposure
of healthy tissue should be minimized.
Swift light ions offer significant physical and radiobiological advantages
compared to photon radiation.
So far the technologically most advanced project to apply charged particles
in radiotherapy was the GSI pilot project, now followed by the dedicated HIT facility.
Ion beam radiotherapy requires sophisticated and efficient dose calculation
and optimization procedures to obtain acceptable treatment plans.
These aspects are integrated within our treatment planning system
(TPS) TRiP98, clinically used in the pilot project,
and further used as a research prototype.
Since ab-initio calculations of radiobiological effects
are neither reliable nor computationally feasible for years to come,
we use the versatile Local Effect model (LEM) for the planning of all
irradiations. Suitable approximations allow reasonably
fast calculations of RBE-weighted dose even in complex configurations.
Recent improvements for low-LET radiation, such as protons,
will allow to compare plans with different ion-beam modalities under realistic conditions.
Optimization of biological dose distributions is an important aspect of treatment planning.
Simultaneous optimization of multiple fields under constraints
results in enhanced target conformation and sparing of organs at risk.
Future developments aim at "adaptive" treatment planning,
i.e. dose painting and irradiation of hypoxic tumours.
Considerable experimental efforts are necessary to validate
the biological dose distributions predicted by the TPS.
Unique devices like the Bio-phantom developed at GSI
provide the means to measure one- and two-dimensional distributions
of cell survival.
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Please submit a short bio (max 1500 characters)
Studied physics at Technical University Darmstadt.
Diploma in 1982. Ph.D. in 1988, thesis in atomic and nuclear physics.
Postdoc position at GSI on parallel and vector computing.
From 1989 to 1994 data processing and UNIX system management
for the FOPI experiment at GSI.
Since 1994 in GSI/Biophysics.
Worked mostly for the radiotherapy pilot project, responsible for developing
the treatment planning software TRiP98. Also responsible as a medical physicist
for providing biological treatment plans and supervising patient irradiation.
Other areas of interest: microscopic track structure and delta-electron emission
(code TRAX, Toroid electron spectrometer).
Still moonlights as a UNIX sysadmin.
Last Name
Alwin Buschbacher
(GSI)
Claere von Neubeck
(GSI)
Dr
Gheorghe Iancu
(GSI)
Prof.
Marco Durante
(GSI)
Michael Horcicka
(GSI)
Dr
Michael Scholz
(GSI)
Dr
Thilo Elsaesser
(GSI, Siemens AG)
Dr
Wilma Kraft-Weyrather
(GSI)
