Abstract
Synchrotron microbeam radiation therapy is a promising pre-clinical radiation treatment modality; however, it comes with many technical challenges. This study describes the image guidance protocol used for Australia’s first long-term pre-clinical MRT treatment of rats bearing 9L gliosarcoma tumours. The protocol utilises existing infrastructure available at the Australian Synchrotron and the adjoining Monash Biomedical Imaging facility. The protocol is designed and optimised to treat small animals utilising high-resolution clinical CT for patient specific tumour identification, coupled with conventional radiography, using the recently developed SyncMRT program for image guidance. Dosimetry performed in small animal phantoms shows patient dose is comparable to standard clinical doses, with a CT associated dose of less than 1.39cGy and a planar radiograh dose of less than 0.03cGy. Experimental validation of alignment accuracy with radiographic film demonstrates end to end accuracy of less than ±0.34mm in anatomical phantoms. Histological analysis of tumour-bearing rats treated with microbeam radiation therapy verifies that tumours are targeted well within applied treatment margins. To date, this technique has been used to treat 35 tumour-bearing rats.
Highlights
The Imaging and Medical Beamline (IMBL) at the Australian Synchrotron [1] has seen a large increase in use for the irradiation of healthy and tumourbearing live animals
Small animal radiotherapy on IMBL has been tightly focused around Microbeam Radiation Therapy (MRT), a preclinical radiotherapy technique that is unique to synchrotron facilities [2,3,4]
We present an end-to-end demonstration of the image-guided microbeam radiation therapy protocol used for Australia’s first long term pre-clinical MRT treatment of rats bearing 9L gliosarcoma tumours [30]
Summary
The Imaging and Medical Beamline (IMBL) at the Australian Synchrotron [1] has seen a large increase in use for the irradiation of healthy and tumourbearing live animals. This has been facilitated by great improvements in the beamline’s technical capabilities surrounding small animal radiotherapy. A hallmark of MRT is the use of a spatially fractionated field [7], which displays a surprisingly high normal tissue dose tolerance and a therapeutic ratio far greater than that of conventional radiotherapy modalities [8,9,10,11]. External beam radiotherapy employs an image-guided patient positioning technique that relies on high-resolution pre-treatment imaging (for accurate identification of tumours) and imaging at the time of treatment to ascertain the position of those tumours relative to the treatment beam
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
