Announcement: Galileo Galilei Award

Abstract

The Galileo Galilei Award in Medical Physics is given every year to the best paper published in this journal in the previous year. In 2019, the prize has been awarded to I. Hernandez-Giron et al., “Development of a 3D printed anthropomorphic lung phantom for image quality assessment in CT”, Phys. Med. 2019;47:47-57. Physica Medica - the European Journal of Medical Physics, is happy to announce that the paper “Technical challenges for FLASH proton therapy” by Simon Jolly, Hywel Owen, Marco Schippers, Carsten Welsch, published in Physica Medica, Volume 78, October 2020, Pages 71-82, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejmp.2020.08.005, has been elected the best paper published in the journal in the year 2020. In this paper the authors performed a comprehensive and systematic study and analysis of the technical challenges posed by the accelerator technology in order to be able to deliver FLASH proton therapy. Particular attention was given to FLASH proton delivery methods concluding that the hybrid approaches employing a combination of the scattering and scanning methods, particularly the use of scanned beams with patient-specific range modulators, are likely to method of choice for clinical proton FLASH delivery. Their work can be regarded as one of the major step towards the clinical implementation of the FLASH treatments using protons. The selection of the best paper has been performed on the basis of citations and downloads together with the assessment by the Editors, Associate Editors and members of the Editorial Board. We congratulate the authors for this paper, as the winners of the Galileo Galilei Award 2020. The Galileo Galilei Award, consisting of a medal and a certificate, will be given to the authors during the ECMP 2020 Conference in Turin, Italy, 16-19 June 2021 (http://www.ecmp2020.org/).