Radiograaff, a proton irradiation facility for radiobiological studies at a 4 MV Van de Graaff accelerator

Abstract

A horizontal beam facility for radiobiological experiments with low-energy protons has been set up at the 4MV Van de Graaff accelerator of the Institut de Physique Nucléaire de Lyon. A homogeneous irradiation field with a suitable proton flux is obtained by means of two collimators and two Au-scattering foils. A monitoring chamber contains a movable Faraday cup, a movable quartz beam viewer for controlling the intensity and the position of the initial incident beam and four scintillating fibers for beam monitoring during the irradiation of the cell samples. The beam line is ended by a thin aluminized Mylar window (12μm thick) for the beam extraction in air. The set-up was simulated by the GATE v6.1 Monte-Carlo platform. The measurement of the proton energy distribution, the evaluation of the fluence-homogeneity over the sample and the calibration of the monitoring system were performed using a silicon PIPS detector, placed in air in the same position as the biological samples to be irradiated. The irradiation proton fluence was found to be homogeneous to within ±2% over a circular field of 20mm diameter. As preliminary biological experiment, two Human Head and Neck Squamous Carcinoma Cell lines (with different radiosensitivities) were irradiated with 2.9MeV protons. The measured survival curves are compared to those obtained after X-ray irradiation, giving a Relative Biological Efficiency between 1.3 and 1.4.