A treatment planning study to assess the feasibility of laser-driven proton therapy using a compact gantry design

Medical Physics
Kerstin M HofmannJ J Wilkens

Abstract

Laser-driven proton acceleration is suggested as a cost- and space-efficient alternative for future radiation therapy centers, although the properties of these beams are fairly different compared to conventionally accelerated proton beams. The laser-driven proton beam is extremely pulsed containing a very high proton number within ultrashort bunches at low bunch repetition rates of few Hz and the energy spectrum of the protons per bunch is very broad. Moreover, these laser accelerated bunches are subject to shot-to-shot fluctuations. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate the feasibility of a compact gantry design for laser-driven proton therapy and to determine limitations to comply with. Based on a published gantry beam line design which can filter parabolic spectra from an exponentially decaying broad initial spectrum, a treatment planning study was performed on real patient data sets. All potential parabolic spectra were fed into a treatment planning system and numerous spot scanning proton plans were calculated. To investigate limitations in the fluence per bunch, the proton number of the initial spectrum and the beam width at patient entrance were varied. A scenario where only integer shots are delivered as w...Continue Reading

References

Aug 6, 1999·Radiotherapy and Oncology : Journal of the European Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology·A J LomaxR O Mirimanoff
Sep 27, 2000·Physical Review Letters·R A SnavelyE M Campbell
Mar 26, 2003·International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics·Nicoletta J Lomax, Stefan G Scheib
May 30, 2003·Medical Physics·Joseph O DeasyVanessa H Clark
Mar 19, 2009·Medical Physics·Alfred R Smith
Aug 30, 2012·Journal of Biophotonics·Kerstin M HofmannJan J Wilkens
Oct 9, 2013·Physica Medica : PM : an International Journal Devoted to the Applications of Physics to Medicine and Biology : Official Journal of the Italian Association of Biomedical Physics (AIFB)·P R BoltonJ J Wilkens
Oct 1, 2014·Zeitschrift für medizinische Physik·Sebastian Faby, Jan J Wilkens

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Citations

Aug 23, 2017·Acta Oncologica·Leonhard KarschJörg Pawelke
Mar 3, 2021·The Review of Scientific Instruments·M Ahsan MahmoodChang Hee Nam

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