NIRS, Chiba-shi
AEC, Chiba
Tumor therapy using energetic carbon ions, as provided by the HIMAC, has been performed since June 1994, and more than 5000 patients were treated until now. With the successful clinical results over more than ten years, we are constructing a new treatment facility. The new facility would have three treatment rooms; two of them have both horizontal and vertical fixed-irradiation-ports, and the other has a rotating-gantry-port. For all the ports, a scanning irradiation method is applied. The new facility is constructed in conjunction with the HIMAC, and heavy-ion beams will be provided by the HIMAC accelerators. To fulfill requirements for the scanning irradiation, we proposed multiple-energy operation with the quasi-DC extension of a flat top. With this operation, the beam energy can be successively varied within a single synchrotron-cycle, and therefore no energy degrader or the range shifter is required. The beam acceleration and extraction tests of the multiple-energy operation were successfully made. We will present the development of this operation as well as results of the beam acceleration tests.
NIRS, Chiba-shi
AEC, Chiba
Based on more than ten years of experience of the carbon cancer therapy with HIMAC, we have proposed a new treatment facility for the further development of the therapy with HIMAC. This facility will consist of three treatment rooms: two rooms equipped with horizontal and vertical beam-delivery systems and one room with a rotating gantry. For the beam-delivery system of the new treatment facility, a 3D hybrid raster-scanning method with gated irradiation with patient's respiration has been proposed. A R&D study has been carried out toward the practical use of the proposed method. In the R&D study, we have improved the beam control of the size, the position and the time structure for the proposed scanning method with the irradiation gated with patient's respiration. Further, owing to the intensity upgrade of the HIMAC synchrotron, we can successfully extend the flattop duration, which can complete one fractional irradiation with one operation period. The building construction of the new treatment facility will be completed at March 2010 and treatment of 1st patient is scheduled at March 2011. We will report the recent progress on the new treatment facility project at HIMAC.
NIRS, Chiba-shi
AEC, Chiba
Toshiba Medical Systems Corporation, Tochigi
In the routine operation of HIMAC synchrotron, a pulse system of field change with 0.2 Gauss in the monitor dipole magnet (B-clock) is used to generate pattern data in the acceleration system. To eliminate error pulse due to noise in analogue field signal, a clock system locked to a 1.2kHz clock for a power supplies was developed, which can be used to generate pattern data of an acceleration system with maximum frequency of 192kHz. This 1.2kHz clock is synchronized to a power line frequency of 50Hz that will fluctuate about 0.1%, so the clock of 192kHz must also follow this frequency fluctuation. To demonstrate the performance of new clock system, we have tested beam acceleration, and compared with the conventional B-clock system. Acceleration efficiencies were checked with changing these clock rates in the both systems. With these tests, we have found that the relatively low clock rate in the newly developed system is enough to get good acceleration performance. In this paper the clock system, and their beam tests will be presented.