Abstract
In the last two decades, there has been a strong research interest in producing radioisotopes with ultra-intense lasers, as an application of laser-driven accelerators in nuclear medicine. Encouraging progress has been obtained in both experiments and simulations. This Review presents the results of several intense studied radioisotopes in detail, i.e., 18F, 11C, 13N, 15O, 99mTc, 64Cu, and 62Cu. As for other less studied radioisotopes, the results are summarized in Sec. II G. The results are listed in Tables I–VII along with laser intensities, maximum ion/photon energies, number of ions/photons per shot, reactions, and laser repetition rates and facilities. For research based on high repetition rate lasers, both single-shot and multi-shot productions are provided for the purpose of comparison. With key technologies implemented in new commissioning ultra-intense lasers, further experiments will definitely help moving this area forward, which will bring the realization of laser-driven radioisotope production closer.
Highlights
Radiopharmaceuticals are essential to diagnosis or therapy in nuclear medicine, in which radioisotopes are delivered to different organs for either diagnostic,1 therapeutic,2 or newly emerging theranostic purposes
Habs et al studied radioisotope production via (γ, xn + yp) photonuclear reactions or (γ, γ ) photoexcitation reactions with high flux (1013–1015 photons/s), small diameter (100 μm), and small bandwidth (ΔE/E ≈ 10−3–10−4) γ beams triggered by intense laser pulses.65,103. These parameters were based on γ beams generated by facilities such as MEGa-RAY, 100 mA energy recovery linac (ERL), and Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI)-NP
There has been encouraging progress in both experimental and theoretical research, there are still improvements to be made before scitation.org/journal/adv laser-driven radioisotope production facilities become available for medical applications
Summary
Radiopharmaceuticals are essential to diagnosis or therapy in nuclear medicine, in which radioisotopes are delivered to different organs for either diagnostic, therapeutic, or newly emerging theranostic purposes. There are over 40 × 106 nuclear medicine procedures performed every year, with an annual increase of up to 5% for the radioisotopes’ demand. The medical radioisotope market was valued at about $7.7 × 109 in 2016, and it is poised to be nearly doubled by 2021.4 the major market share is in developed countries, an accelerating increase in developing countries could happen through multidisciplinary collaboration and web-based e-learning platforms.. There have been variant application programs developed for simulation, such as the Calder Monte Carlo (CMC) code, the particle-in-cell (PIC) code Mandor, the medical isotope production modality in the TALYS software, the PIC code EPOCH, the Geant toolkit, and the Geant4-GENBOD code.50,51 Summarizing these publications, there is an obvious strive on the production of nuclear medicine radioisotopes for higher yields with smaller size of laser systems. With the commissioning of new ultra-high-power laser facilities such as the Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI) pillars [e.g., ELI-Beamlines (ELI-BL) commissioned in 2018], there are strong research efforts in exploring radioisotope production with laser-driven particles, except for radiotherapy with ultra-high dose rate laser produced ions..
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