Speaker
Description
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 commissioning phase at the CNAO centre (Centro Nazionale di Adroterapia Oncologica) in Pavia (Italy). It consists of an in-beam Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scanner and a scintillating fiber tracker, which exploit the beam-induced $\beta^+$ activity and secondary charged fragments, respectively.
A clinical trial (ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03662373) is going to start in the next months. Patients affected by four selected pathologies of Head-and-Neck and Brain districts will be monitored.
In two of these pathologies (i.e. skull base (clivus) chordoma treated with carbon ion therapy and meningioma treated with proton therapy) no morphological changes are expected and, therefore, the results will be useful in the determination of the reproducibility of the measurements and the clinical limits for the detection of significant range differences. Instead, in the other two pathologies (i.e. adenoid cystic carcinoma treated with carbon ion therapy and squamocellular rhinopharynx carcinoma treated with proton therapy) morphological changes have been found and are known to require replanning in clinics. Therefore, they are included in order to test the sensitivity of the system and its effectiveness as supporting tool in the scheduling of personalized control exams.
In this contribution, a preliminary study of the interfractional monitoring capability of the INSIDE system will be shown.
