The Radiation Therapy (RT) goal is to destroy cancer cells, minimizing the damage to the rest of the body as well as any side effect. The "FLASH" Therapy, an innovative technique in radiation therapy, has shown that short pulses of electrons at very high dose rates are less harmful to healthy tissues but just as efficient as conventional dose rate radiation to inhibit tumour growth.
The...
There is growing interest in the radiotherapy community over the applications of FLASH radiotherapy, wherein the X-ray dose is delivered to the entire treatment volume in less than a second. Early pre-clinical evidence suggests that these extremely high dose rates provide significant sparing of healthy tissue compared to conventional radiotherapy without reducing the damage to cancerous...
Research in the field of hadron therapy has led to a new perspective for radiotherapy treatment of cancer patients through the development of a linear proton accelerator based on high gradient technology. The main challenges of such a facility are the effective acceleration of low energy beams and the reduction of the facility footprint and its electricity consumption. All-linac designs for...
Range verification techniques for protontherapy include positron-emission tomography (PET) and prompt-gamma (PG) imaging. The main challenges preventing their clinical implementation are, in case of PET, the relatively long half-lives of the isotopes of interest and the large energy needed to activate PET-decaying nuclei [1].
We have investigated the use of certain isotopes as contrast agents...
As proton therapy has become a well-established cancer treatment modality, research towards improvement of quality assurance and new treatment monitoring methods have intensified. Proton therapy offers more favorable dose deposition pattern than conventional radiotherapy, however it could be further improved if currently applied safety margins were reduced. This would be possible if methods of...
In proton beam therapy, knowledge of the detailed beam properties is essential to ensure effective dose delivery to the patient. In clinical practice, currently used interceptive ionisation chambers require daily calibration and suffer from slow response time. Therefore, novel silicon-based detector technologies are developed. This contribution presents a non-invasive method for dose online...
At PSI (Paul Scherrer Institute) Villigen, Switzerland, a superconductive cyclotron called “COMET” delivers pulsed proton beam of 250MeV at 72.85MHz for proton radiation therapy. Measuring proton beam current (0.1-40 nA) is of crucial importance and is traditionally measured with invasive monitors such as ionization chambers. A new non-invasive beam current monitor working on the principle of...
MedAustron is a synchrotron based medical accelerator using protons and carbon ions for cancer treatment, it is based near Vienna in Wiener-Neustadt, Austria. It has been operational since 2016 and it treated 193 patients in 2018.
Simultaneous beam intensity and beam profile measurements over time with various beam parameters at the IR1 non-clinical research beamline have been performed...
Introduction: Proton computed tomography can reduce uncertainties in proton therapy treatment planning. It requires a 330 MeV proton beam for full imaging of an adult body and the beam rigidity increases to 2.8 Tm (from 2.3 Tm at 230 MeV). If such rotating beam delivery system is to be placed in a hospital-based facility, superconducting technology must be employed to minimise the gantry...
A proton therapy facility based on the superconducting cyclotron is under development in HUST (Huazhong University of Science and Technology), which uses warm magnets for beam transport lines and gantries. For future upgrade, a lightweight superconducting gantry is under consideration. This paper describes the design of a superconducting gantry with alternating-gradient combined-function...
FLUKA (Ferrari et al. 2005, Böhlen et al. 2014) is a multi-purpose Monte Carlo code for particle transport, developed by a CERN-INFN collaboration. In hadron therapy it is used to generate the basic input data for the treatment planning systems (e.g. at CNAO in Italy, and at HIT and MIT in Germany), to validate the dose calculations, and for research purposes (Battistoni et al....
To really exploit the potential benefits of Particle Therapy (PT), the highest possible accuracy in the calculation of dose and its spatial distribution is required in treatment planning. Commonly used Treatment Planning Software (TPS) solutions adopt a simplified beam–body interaction model using a 3D water equivalent representation of the patient morphology. An alternative is the use of...
The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre (CCC) in the United Kingdom is the world’s first hospital proton beam therapy facility, treating patients with ocular cancer since 1989. In recent years there has been rapid growth across Europe in both the demand and provision of particle radiation therapy treatments, with multiple centres under development in the UK. Correspondingly, this has brought about the...
In protontherapy, secondary particles can be produced through primary beam interactions with the patient’s body. Fragments created in inelastic interactions of the beam with the target nuclei have low kinetic energy, high atomic number and high LET as compared to primary protons.
These secondary particles produce an altered dose distribution, due to their different ranges. The residual range...
Proton therapy is increasingly used in modern radiation therapy. In the quality assurance of Proton therapy facilities, a recurring dosimetric task is the verification of the stability of the proton ranges in water for all energies provided by the system. The conventional measurement method using an ionization chamber with an adjustable water column (e.g. PTW Peakfinder) is very...
The use of C, He and O ions in Particle Therapy (PT) exploits the enhanced Relative Biological Effectiveness and Oxygen Enhancement Ratio of such projectiles to improve the treatment efficacy in damaging the cancerous cells while reducing the dose to the surrounding Organs At Risk.
The possible occurrence of inter-fraction morphological changes into the patient or patient mis-positioning with...
MedAustron is an Ion Beam Therapy center where patients are treated with protons and carbon ions beams. A performance increase project has been started in 2016 in parallel to further commissioning of the facility. The machine was and keep being optimized to reduce the time necessary for a treatment, in order to increase patient throughput, enhance safety and quality of the treatment and...
Biophysical investigations using particle accelerators have gained interest in the last decades, coinciding with the spread of particle therapy centres worldwide and with the establishment of proton and ion therapy as recognized treatments for different types of tumours, with excellent clinical outcomes. Radiobiological experiments at proton and heavy-ion accelerators pose stringent conditions...
The Italian National Center for Oncological Hadrontherapy is currently upgrading one of the software environments of its medical accelerator control system. This environment, named configuration and support environment, is tasked with the configuration of accelerator components, management of the control system repository, and other support tasks. The objective of the three year technological...
Although the use of particle therapy continues to expand, specific challenges inhibit its broader penetration as well as its clinical efficacy under certain conditions: The size and cost of particle therapy systems and their operation are restrictions. Also, technical limitations associated with the achievable level of dose conformality often hinder the advancement of particle therapy in...
In particle therapy, image guidance is vital for planning and treating, especially for abdominal lesions, where the respiratory motion hinders treatment accuracy. In this study, fast acquired interleaved 2D CINE MR images were used to quantify the tumour (GTV) motion over several breathing cycles, to evaluate the clinical approach based on deriving an internal target volume (ITV) from a...
Nowadays different electronic devices are used in radiotherapy to improve and optimize the treat-ments. The scattered radiation in the radiotherapy environment can cause failures and/or damages to the electronics and therefore the devices must be radiation resistant in order to assure a secure treatment.
ViALUX developed in the last years a new 3D scanning technology that allows increasing...
Introduction
Lung and other thoracic cancer survival rates have shown limited improvements despite generally more effective local control rates. Scanned particle beam therapy has the potential for dose escalation while sparing healthy tissue, but it requires a practicable solution to the longstanding problem of the adverse effects from the interplay of moving ion beams and moving tumors....
Since many years, proton therapy is used as an effective treatment solution against deep-seated tumors. A precise quantification of sources of uncertainties in each proton therapy aspect (e.g. accelerator, beam lines, patient positioning, treatment planning) is of extreme importance to increase the robustness of the dose delivered to the patient.
Together with Monte Carlo techniques, a new...
Several animal studies demonstrated that delivering radiation dose in a short time, i.e. with only a few beam pulses of ultra-high dose per pulse, may dramatically reduce adverse side effects, while the anti-tumoural efficacy is preserved. Due to this so-called FLASH effect, the prescribed dose could also be increased resulting in a more effective tumour control. The future application of...
Particle accelerators used for cancer treatment have made tremendous progress in the recent decades in respect to performance, dose delivery and control techniques as well as their usability within clinical environments. This area is currently experiencing a growing development that promises even bigger achievements in the future regarding treatable indications, cure rates and side effects....
Modern particle therapy requires systems which enable precise control over delivered dose depth. That translates into the ability to program the accelerator to quickly modulate the beam energy in order to deposit the treatment dose into predefined tissue regions. In particle therapy applications linear accelerators have advantages in terms of compactness and beam modulation ability. However to...
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This work presents the recent developments of the FLUKA [1,2,3] Particle Therapy Tool [4]. FLUKA is a general-purpose Monte Carlo (MC), particle transport code, used for an extended range of applications including medical physics. Together with the support of its graphical user interface Flair [5,6], an easy-to use platform was developed for MC simulations in particle therapy. It has already...
Characterization of commercial photo-devices as dose-rate sensors
M.A. Carvajal1, I. Ruiz-García1, J. Román-Raya2, J. Montes2, D. Guirado2, P. Escobedo1, A. Martínez-Olmos1, A.M. Lallena Rojo1 , A.J. Palma1
1 University of Granada, Granada, Spain
2 Universitary Hospital San Cecilio, Granada, Spain
Introduction. The main application of photodiodes, phototransistors is to measure...
Design study of a lightweight superconducting gantry applied to proton therapy was performed at HUST. By using alternating-gradient (AG) CCT magnets, the footprint and weight of the gantry can be significant reduced. Meanwhile, a large momentum acceptance avoids the requirement of fast magnetic field change of superconducting magnets during tumor treatment. We presented a beam optics design...
Recently, the superconducting gantry is gained more and more attentions due to the advantages on the reduction of the footprint and weight. Aiming at the light weight gantry beamline with a large momentum acceptance, we proposed a superconducting gantry scheme employing a fast degrader, combined-function AG-CCT magnets and downstream scanning nozzle. To reduce the secondary neutrons on the...
SC230 a 230 MeV superconducting cyclotron designed in JINR. It is intended to be developed as a joint project with ASIPP. The cyclotron is designed for proton therapy and biomedical research. This presentation focuses on the results of the conceptual design of the accelerator. In the process of physical design, simulations of the magnetic and RF systems were carried out, the main...
The Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), Germany's national primary standard laboratory, operates a custom-designed electron LINAC for the generation of high energy electron and photon radiation for research in the field of dosimetry for radiation therapy. The beam energy of this LINAC is variable in the range from 0.5 MeV up to 50 MeV.
The preparation of a beam at a LINAC is an...
Purpose: Since December 2016 at the MedAustron Ion Therapy center (MA) patients have been treated with protons. The synchrotron accelerator is also able to deliver carbon ions with energies between 120 and 402.8 MeV/u (ranges from 2.9 to 27 cm in water). In this work we report the results of dosimetric commissioning of the pencil beam algorithm PBv3.0 available in the treatment planning...
ABSTRACT
In radiotherapy, treating of cancer patients require the use of immobilizing devices such as thermoplastic masks. These masks increase the patient skin doses, but its effect is normally overlooked. This work is done to determine the thermoplastic mask factor to compensate for it just as applied to trays and wedges. Measurements are done at source-to-suface distance of 80 cm for...
Charged Particle Therapy (CPT) is a highly effective method for treating several types of solid tumours. However, in heavy ion therapy nuclear inelastic interactions of the incident beam with the patient tissues lead to the break-up of the incident ion. The produced fragments of projectile have a longer range with respect to the primaries and lead to an undesirable dose deposition beyond the...
Introduction: Cyclotron-based proton therapy facilities use an energy degrader of variable thickness to deliver the beam of the energy required by treatment plan. Together with the energy reduction, the transverse size and energy spread increase. The collimation and energy selection systems downstream of the degrader cut the beam to match the following beamline, that introduces...
The transparent polymer polyallyl-diglycol-carbonate (PADC), also known as CR-39, is widely used for ion detection in laser-plasma interactions. It allows for detection of single protons and ions via formation of microscopic tracks after etching in NaOH or KOH solutions. PADC combines a high sensitivity and high specificity with inertness towards electromagnetic noise.
We have developed...
PENH was initially developed as the extension of PENENELOPE (a code system for Monte Carlo simulation of electron and photon transport), which incorporated the electromagnetic transport of protons aiming to its application to protontherapy. Nevertheless, the absence of nuclear interactions prevented the accurate estimation of the dose deposition along the beam axis in protontherapy...
In particle therapy, an on-line treatment verification device is highly required to reduce the uncertainty of the actual particle range during the patient irradiation and interfractional morphological changes. The final aim is to improve the robustness and effectiveness of the treatment in terms of conformity of the dose released to the target.
The INSIDE bi-modal system is currently in the...
In proton therapy, in-vivo PET range verification requires a comparison of the measured and expected β$^{+}$ activity distribution produced by the proton beam by means of nuclear reactions on the most abundant elements in the body of the patient: C, O, N and, to a lesser extent, P and Ca. The accuracy of the expected activity distributions depends on the accuracy of the Monte Carlo...
FLASH radiotherapy is a novel treatment modality, which promises reduced normal tissue toxicity while keeping the same tumor control. This so-called "FLASH effect" can be observed when delivering high doses of radiation in very short time and was demonstrated by Favaudon et al. in 2014 using a 4.5 MeV electron beam to irradiate mouse lungs in vivo. Since then multiple other experiments...
Proton therapy for cancer treatment is a rapidly growing field as increasing evidence suggests it induces more complex damage in DNA than photons [1]. Accurate comparison between the two requires quantification of the damage caused, one method being the comet assay [2]. The program discussed here, based on neural network architecture, aims to speed up analysis of comet assay images and provide...
The secondary neutrons produced in Particle Therapy treatments can travel along the path inside the patient and contribute with additional dose in-and out-of-field. This unwanted dose increases the risk of developing secondary cancers: late insurgences are particularly crucial in paediatric patients where the closeness of the organs and the recurrence onset strongly impacts the life...
To fully exploit the advantages of therapeutic ion beams, on-line monitoring of the dose deposition would be highly desirable. At present, several methods have been proposed to determine the beam range using the secondary radiation originating from the interactions between the therapeutic beam and the tissues. Two main techniques are prompt gamma imaging (PGI) and positron emission tomography...
