TY  - GEN
TI  - Proof of principle detector for fast patient quality assurance
Y1  - 2019/06/12/
AV  - public
N2  - Standard clinical practice in particle therapy is to verify the treatment plan for each patient before the plan is delivered. This patient specific QA process normally involves repeated delivery of the treatment plan to a water or water equivalent volume, with changes to the position of a dosimeter or dosimetric array in order to measure the volumetric dose distribution. Due to the repeated delivery of each field, patient QA can be extremely time consuming. An ideal patient QA system would allow measurements at the speed of treatment delivery ie. within a few minutes.

We present measurements with a simple proof-of-concept system for fast patient QA. The system is essentially a stripped-down proton CT detector, utilising a single tracking detector developed for the PRaVDA proton CT detector coupled to a single scintillating calorimeter module adapted from the SuperNEMO high energy physics experiment. The calorimeter consists of a plastic scintillator, providing the water-equivalent medium into which the beam is delivered. By measuring the position of each particle as it enters the calorimeter it is possible to reconstruct the dose deposition of individual particles and thereby reconstruct the 3D volumetric dose deposition.

Results are presented from experiments with protons at the Birmingham University 36MeV cyclotron showing volumetric dose reconstruction at proton rates well below clinical fluences. A method for scaling this system up to a full clinical patient QA system is also described.
ID  - discovery10192887
UR  - https://ptcog58.org/
A1  - Price, Tony
A1  - Allport, Phil
A1  - Green, Stuart
A1  - Shaikh, Saad
A1  - Radogna, Raffaella
A1  - Walker, Daniel
A1  - Kelleter, Laurent
A1  - Basharina-Freshville, Anastasia
A1  - Saakyan, Ruben
A1  - Jolly, Simon
ER  -