Measurements of deposited dose with induced β + activity in proton and heavy-ion therapy

Abstract

For the effective utilization of the favorable properties of heavy-ion beams in cancer treatment, it is important to evaluate the range of incident ions and the deposited dose distribution in a patient's body. For this purpose, the utilization of positron emitters induced in therapeutic irradiation is, at present, the only feasible method for in situ and non-invasive monitoring of heavy-ion therapy. In this study, we performed irradiation experiments with three species of ions to a water target, and the annihilation gamma-ray distributions were obtained with a positron camera. We applied the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method for the detected distributions to derive the range of incident ions and the deposited dose distribution in the target. As a result, the ranges were determined with a difference between the MLE range R MLE and the experimental range R exp less than 1.1 mm. The good agreement between the estimated dose distribution with the MLE method and the measured one implies that a deposited dose distribution in a target could be estimated from a detected annihilation gamma-ray distribution.