Measurement of charged particle yields from therapeutic beams in view of the design of an innovative hadrontherapy dose monitor

摘要

Particle Therapy (PT) is an emerging technique, which makes use of charged particles to efficiently cure different kinds of solid tumors. The high precision in the hadrons dose deposition requires an accurate monitoring to prevent the risk of under-dosage of the cancer region or of overdosage of healthy tissues. Monitoring techniques are currently being developed and are based on the detection of particles produced by the beam interaction into the target, in particular: charged particles, result of target and/or projectile fragmentation, prompt photons coming from nucleus deexcitation and back-to-back gs, produced in the positron annihilation from β+ emitters created in the beam interaction with the target. It has been showed that the hadron beam dose release peak can be spatially correlated with the emission pattern of these secondary particles. Here we report about secondary particles production (charged fragments and prompt gs) performed at different beam and energies that have a particular relevance for PT applications: ~(12)C beam of 80 MeV/u at LNS, ~(12)C beam 220 MeV/u at GSI, and ~(12)C, ~4He, ~(16)O beams with energy in the 50–300 MeV/u range at HIT. Finally, a project for a multimodal dose-monitor device exploiting the prompt photons and charged particles emission will be presented.