The potential role of borophene as a radiosensitizer in PT and BNCT was investigated.

Single-atom nanozyme (SAzyme) systems have shown great potential in tumor therapy. A multifunctional SAzyme not only possesses high catalytic activity but also can be used as photothermal agents in photothermal therapy (PTT). Furthermore, it is also imperative to overcome tumor thermal resistance in SAzyme-based PTT so that PTT under a mild temperature is achievable. Herein, a novel platelet membrane (PM)-coated mesoporous Fe single-atom nanozyme (Fe-SAzyme) was formulated to solve these issues. The PM-coated mesoporous Fe-SAzyme (PMS) showed a satisfactory NIR-II photothermal performance, high peroxidase (POD) activity, and good tumor-targeting ability. In addition, PMS may be used as a carrier for protein drugs owing to its inner mesoporous structure. In vitro experiments showed that PMS could inhibit the expression of heat shock protein (HSP) by damaging the mitochondria, thereby finally improving the effect of mild-temperature PTT. Moreover, in vivo results showed that PMS could efficiently accumulate in tumor sites and suppress tumor growth with minimal toxicity in major organs. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first report of a biomimetic mesoporous Fe-SAzyme used to achieve mitochondrial damage-mediated mild-temperature PTT. The study provides new promising ideas for designing other SAzyme systems for cancer treatment.

Purpose In vivo range and dose verification based on proton‐induced acoustics (protoacoustics) is potentially a useful tool for proton therapy. Built upon our previous study with two‐dimensional reconstruction, the time reversal (TR) method was extended to three‐dimensional (3D) and evaluated at two treatment sites (head and liver) through simulation, with the emphasis on a number of aspects such as increased spatial coverage, computational workload, and signal interference among slices. Methods Two mono‐energetic pencil beams were modeled in each site. The k‐Wave toolbox was used to investigate the propagation and TR reconstruction of acoustic waves. The performance was quantitatively assessed based on mean square error (MSE) for dose verification and Bragg peak localization error (ΔBP) for range verification, with regard to five parameters: number of sensors, sampling duration, sampling timestep, spill time, and noise level. Results The respective impacts of five parameters are examined. Under the optimum setting, the achievable ΔBP can be limited within 1 voxel (voxel size: 3 × 3 × 3 mm3) and the achievable MSE can be limited below 0.02, for the head case (56 sensors) and the liver case (204 sensors), respectively. Conclusions The feasibility of range and dose verification utilizing the 3D TR method is demonstrated, as the very first step. In spite of several challenges unique to the 3D case (spatial coverage, computational workload, and signal interference among slices, etc.), promising performance is found and can be further improved through optimizing the deployment of sensors. The proposed approach may find potential use in several applications: beam diagnostics, in vivo dosimetry, and treatment monitoring.

In beamline design, there are many floating parameters that need to be tuned; manual optimization is time-consuming and laborious work, and it is also difficult to obtain well optimized results. Moreover, there are always several objectives that need to be considered and optimized at the same time, making the problem more complicated. For example, asking for both the flux and energy to be as large as possible is a usual requirement, but the changing trends of these two variables are often contradictory. In this study, a novel optimization method based on a multi-objective genetic algorithm is introduced, the first attempt to optimize a beamline with multiple objectives. In order to verify this method, beamline ID17 of the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) is taken as an example for simulation, with energy and dose rate as objectives. The result shows that this method can be effective for beamline optimization, and an optimal solution set can be obtained within 30 generations. For the solutions whose objectives are both improved compared with those of ESRF beamline ID17, the maximums of energy and dose rate increase by around 7% and 20%, respectively.

NaI(Tl+Li) (NaIL) is a promising new inorganic scintillator for thermal neutron detection with the ability for pulse shape discrimination (PSD). In this study, we first built a dual-gamma/neutron sensitive detector based on a NaIL scintillator, a photomultiplier tube and a custom-built circuit. Then, we investigated its temperature response and optimized the PSD parameters, obtaining a figure of merit (FOM) of up to 4.5 at 0–50°C. Also, we examined the effect of the count rate on the detector's neutron and gamma discrimination performance; after optimization, we obtained an FOM of above 3.0 at 5000–40000 counts per second. Lastly, we estimated the neutron detection efficiency of this detector, which is about 13 cps/nv. This detector gave an excellent performance in neutron/gamma discrimination, and can be used widely in the detection of mixed radiation fields.