At the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare-Laboratori Nazionali del Sud (INFN-LNS) in Catania, Italy, the first Italian protontherapy facility, named Centro di AdroTerapia e Applicazioni Nucleari Avanzate (CATANA) has been built in collaboration with the University of Catania. It is based on the use of the 62-MeV proton beam delivered by the = 800 Superconducting Cyclotron installed and working at INFN-LNS since 1995. The facility is mainly devoted to the treatment of ocular diseases like uveal melanoma. A beam treatment line in air has been assembled together with a dedicated positioning patient system. The facility has been in operation since the beginning of 2002 and 66 patients have been successfully treated up to now. The main features of CATANA together with the clinical and dosimetric features will be extensively described; particularly, the proton beam line, that has been entirely built at LNS, with all its elements, the experimental transversal and depth dose distributions of the 62-MeV proton beam obtained for a final collimator of 25-mm diameter and the experimental depth dose distributions of a modulated proton beam obtained for the same final collimator. Finally, the clinical results over 1 yr of treatments, describing the features of the treated diseases will be reported.

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At the University of Pisa, the DoPET (Dosimetry with a Positron Emission Tomograph) project has focused on the development and characterization of an ad hoc, scalable, dual-head PET prototype for in-beam treatment planning verification of the proton therapy. In this paper we report the first results obtained with our current prototype, consisting of two opposing lutetium yttrium orthosilicate (LYSO) detectors, each one covering an area of 4.5x4.5 cm(2). We measured the beta(+)-activation induced by 62 MeV proton beams at Catana facility (LNS, Catania, Italy) in several plastic phantoms. Experiments were performed to evaluate the possibility to extract accurate phantom geometrical information from the reconstructed PET images. The PET prototype proved its capability of locating small air cavities in homogeneous PMMA phantoms with a submillimetric accuracy and of distinguishing materials with different (16)O and (12)O content by back mapping phantom geometry through the separation of the isotope contributions. This could be very useful in the clinical practice as a tool to highlight anatomical or physiological organ variations among different treatment sessions and to discriminate different tissue types, thus providing feedbacks for the accuracy of dose deposition

This paper describes a new real-time, in vivo, noninvasive, biasless detector system acting as a beam monitoring and relative dose measurement system. The detector is based on the idea that when a beam current is injected into the body of a patient undergoing a charged particle therapy, the current itself can be collected using a conductive electrode in contact with the patient’s skin. This new approach was studied in vitro using an electrically isolated water tank irradiated with monoenergetic proton beams. The conductive electrode was immersed in water and positioned outside the irradiation field. The detection system performance was evaluated by comparing its response against a SEM (Secondary Emission Monitor) detector, used as a reference beam current monitor, and an Advanced Markus ionization chamber. Short-, mid- and long-term reproducibility, current monitoring capability, field size dependence, electrode position and environment temperature dependence, linearity with dose, and dose rate dependence were investigated. Few preliminary in vivo tests were also performed that demonstrated the possibility to apply the system in clinical practice. The potential of the proposed method is considerable, representing a simple and economical system for online, in vivo, and noninvasive monitoring of the beam current and relative released dose into the patient during treatment, without perturbing the irradiation field. The system presented in this work is protected with both a National Italian (N. 102017000087851) and an International N. WO 2019/025933 patent.