Abstract
Proton therapy technique for cancer treatment offers a high selectivity with respect to conventional radiotherapy with X- and γ-rays due to the properties of the interaction of protons with matter. Very accurate and precise treatment plans and a good control on the dose deposition are required to exploit the full potential of the technique. The substitution of the currently used X-ray Computed Tomography (xCT) by proton Computed Tomography (pCT) in the design of treatment plans would allow for a reduction in proton range uncertainties. This would make possible an important improvement in the accuracy and precision of treatment plans. With this aim, a prototype of pCT scanner is under study. It includes two tracking detectors which provide information on the proton trajectories and a residual energy detector to determine the energy loss while traversing the object scanned. A proof-of-concept experiment has been performed using low-energy protons and a simplified prototype with only the two tracking detectors. The results obtained in the measurement are presented and discussed.
Highlights
CANCER is a leading cause of death worldwide and accounted for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020
Proton therapy offers the great advantage with respect to conventional radiotherapy with X- or g-rays of being more selective applying a higher dose to the tumor with respect to the surrounding healthy tissues
For proton imaging the second layer of LaCl3(Ce) scintillator is not used as protons of up to 120 MeV are fully stopped in the first layer of LaBr3(Ce) crystals
Summary
CANCER is a leading cause of death worldwide and accounted for nearly 10 million deaths in 2020. The design of more accurate and precise treatment plans than those of conventional radiotherapy This is needed to reduce the uncertainties on proton ranges avoiding a high dose to be applied to healthy tissues. To obtain the treatment plan with protons, a conversion to a map of Relative Stopping Powers (RSP), which is the interesting physical quantity in proton therapy, is made. This conversion induces relatively large uncertainties in the range of protons which can be as large as 5% in the abdomen or 11% in the head [1]. A residual energy detector is used to fully stop the protons at the end of the path and be able to determine their energy loss in the object
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