Abstract
In Particle Therapy, safety margins are applied around the tumor to account for the beam range uncertainties and ensure an adequate dose coverage of the tumor volume during the therapy. The reduction of safety margins is in great demand in order to diminish the Particle Therapy side effects especially in the case of treatment of tumors close to Organs at Risk (OAR) and of pediatric patients. To this aim, beam range monitoring techniques are being developed by the scientific community, most of all based on the detection of secondary particles produced by the nuclear interactions of the beam with the patient’s tissue nuclei. In this contribution, a novel beam range monitoring technique is proposed, based on the detection of prompt photons exploiting the pair production mechanism. The proof of principle of the PAir PRoduction Imaging ChAmber (PAPRICA) is studied through the development of a Monte Carlo simulation and the detector performances toward a more realistic scenario are determined.
Highlights
Particle Therapy (PT) is a type of external radiotherapy exploiting charged ion beams to treat solid tumors
The aim of the PAir PRoduction Imaging ChAmber (PAPRICA) project is the proof of principle of a novel beam range monitoring technique based on prompt gamma imaging exploiting the pair production mechanism
A prompt gamma-based range monitoring exploiting the pair production mechanism has several advantages with respect to other proposed techniques: a 3D imaging that could be in principle possible, the simple reconstruction algorithm, the intrinsically E > 4 MeV targeted prompt photons which are the ones with the stronger correlation to the beam range, the topological event signature allowing good background discrimination enhancing the possibility of exploiting the prompt photon imaging in the case of carbon ion therapy, and the no need of mechanical collimation nor time or energy analyses of the detected signal
Summary
Particle Therapy (PT) is a type of external radiotherapy exploiting charged ion beams (mainly protons and carbon ions) to treat solid tumors. The minimization of safety margins would be of large importance especially when tumors are seated in the proximity of OARs or in the treatment of long-life expectation patients as the pediatric ones [4], in which the occurrence of long-term side effects has a stronger impact For such reasons, a large effort is being made by the scientific community in order to develop a beam range verification technique [5, 6] capable of operating on-line, i.e., during the PT treatment, to provide prompt feedback on the actual administered dose spatial distribution. The obtained results by these two studies are very promising too, even though in the case of Compton Cameras limitations mainly due to the complex reconstruction algorithms have not yet been overcome [22] In this contribution, a novel 3D PG imaging technique is proposed, exploiting the pair production (PP) interactions to reconstruct the incoming photon emission direction. The PAPRICA design and its expected performances, evaluated by means of Monte Carlo simulations performed with the FLUKA software [24, 25], will be shown hereafter
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