PSI/Center for Proton Therapy, Villigen
As 3D-conformal treatment has become the clearly accepted goal of radiation oncology, charged particle treatment with protons and heavier ions ascended to the forefront. After three decades of > 50,000 treated patients, proton radiotherapy has established itself as an accepted and often preferred treatment modality for tumors requiring high-dose conformal irradiation. It has continuously demonstrated its ability of dose reduction to normal tissues, thus becoming the RT modality of choice for pediatric malignancies. Simultaneously, heavier ions, notably carbon ion therapy, have been developed at fewer centers, involving approximately 5,000 patients worldwide. The rational is primarily based on a comparable dose distribution compared to protons but with the potential benefit of increased biologic effectiveness. Radioresistant tumors are believed to benefit most from carbon ion therapy. The current status of clinical results will be discussed. The majority of clinical data have been obtained on rare, but difficult to treat tumors, for example mesenchymal tumors of the skull base and paraspinal region. Here, an approximate 10-15% tumor control advantage has been observed for particle therapy. Most clinical data are based on Phase I/II protocols. The anticipated future direction of the role of particle therapy in medicine is a complex subject and involves an interplay of radio-biology, accelerator physics and radiation oncology.
NIRS, Chiba-shi
Heavy-ion beams have attractive growing interest for cancer treatment owing to their high dose localization at the Bragg peak as well as high biological effect there. Recently, therefore, heavy-ion cancer treatments have been successfully carried out at various facilities and several construction projects for the facility of the heavy-ion therapy have also been progressing in the world, based on the development of accelerator technologies.
ETH/Ion Beam Physics Laboratory, Zürich
Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) provides instrumentation originally developed by nuclear physicists more than 30 years ago to measure long lived cosmogenic radionuclides such as 10Be, 14C, 26Al, 36Cl, 41Ca, 129I, U, Pu and Pa at natural levels. In the past ten years impressive progress in the measurement technique has been made and with the appearance of compact low energy radiocarbon AMS systems, a new category of AMS instruments has been introduced. This has resulted in a boom of new AMS facilities with more than 20 new installations over the last five years. But low energy AMS is not limited to radiocarbon only and there is a great potential for 10Be, 26Al, 129I and actinides measurements at compact AMS systems. The latest developments towards the low energy limit of AMS resulted in two new types of systems, the NEC Single Stage AMS (SSAMS) and ETH mini carbon dating system (MICADAS) operating with terminal voltages of about 200 kV only. In addition, systems like the HVEE 1 MV Tandetron or the compact ETH 600 kV system are capable to extent the range of applications at compact systems beyond radiocarbon. These systems will have enormous impact, not only on the use of AMS in biomedical research and on radiocarbon dating but also for research applications with 10Be, 26Al, 129I and actinides.
INFN/PG, Perugia
ESA-ESTEC, Noordwijk
INFN/LNS, Catania
MapRad, Perugia
Abant Izzet Baysal Üniversitesi, Bolu
ODTU/Phys. Dept., Ankara
This paper describes the beam monitoring system that has been developed at the Superconducting Cyclotron at INFN-LNS (Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Laboratori Nazionali del Sud, Catania, Italy) in order to monitor the beam parameters such as energy, flux, beam profile, for SEE (Single Event Effects) cross-sections determination and DD (Displacement Damage) studies. In order to have an accurate and continuous monitoring of beam parameters we have developed fully automatic dosimetry setup to be used during SEE (with heavy ions) and DD (with protons of 60 MeV/n) tests of electronic devices and systems. The final goal of our activity is to demonstrate how operating in air, which in our experience is easier than in vacuum, is not detrimental to the accuracy on controlling the beam profile, energy and fluence delivered onto the DUT (Device Under Test) surface, even with non relativistic heavy ions. We have exposed during the same session, two beam calibration systems, the "Reference SEU monitor" developed by ESA/ESTEC and the beam monitoring and dosimetry setup developed by our group. The results are compared and discussed here.
RIKEN, Wako
A highly sensitive beam current monitor with an HTS (High-Temperature Superconducting) SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device) and an HTS current sensor, that is, an HTS SQUID monitor, has been developed for use of the RIBF (RI beam factory) at RIKEN. Unlike other existing facilities, the HTS SQUID monitor allows us to measure the DC of high-energy heavy-ion beams nondestructively in real time, and the beam current extracted from the cyclotron can be recorded without interrupting the beam user's experiments. Both the HTS magnetic shield and the HTS current sensor were dip-coated to form a Bi2 - Sr2 - Ca2 - Cu3 - Ox (Bi-2223) layer on 99.9 % MgO ceramic substrates. In the present work, all the fabricated HTS devices are cooled by a low-vibration pulse-tube refrigerator. These technologies enabled us to downsize the system. Prior to practical use at the RIBF, the HTS-SQUID monitor was installed in the beam transport line of the RIKEN ring cyclotron to demonstrate its performance. As a result, a 20 μA 40Ar15+ beam intensity (63 MeV/u) was successfully measured with a 500 nA resolution. Despite the performance taking place in an environment with strong gamma ray and neutron flux radiations, RF background and large stray magnetic fields, the measurements were successfully carried out in this study. This year, the HTS SQUID monitor was upgraded to have aresolution of 100 nA and was reinstalled inthe beam transport line, enabling us to measure a 4 μA 132Xe20+ (10.8 MeV/u) beam and a 1 μA 132Xe41+ (50.1 MeV/u) beam used for the accelerator operations at RIBF. Hence, we will report the results of the beam measurements an the present status of the HTS SQUID monitor.