Measurement and verification of positron emitter nuclei generated at each treatment site by target nuclear fragment reactions in proton therapy

Abstract

In each proton treatment site, verification of the characteristics of the generated positron emitter nuclei was performed by using BOLPs-RGp. For the monitoring of the proton irradiated volume, the detection of (15)O generated in a human body was important.

Proton Therapy Verification with PET Imaging

“…Currently in-beam PET detectors for hardon therapy (including carbon beam and proton therapy) are installed or under development in several facilities around the world, such as the Gesellschaft für Schwerioneneforschung (GSI), Darmstadt, Germany 21, 22; the Heavy Ion Medical Accelerator (HIMA) in Chiba, Japan 23; the CATANA Protontherapy Center in Catana, Italy 24, and the National Cancer Center (NCC), Kashiwa, Japan 13-15. The most important advantage of in-beam detectors is the time course of PET acquisitions.…”

“…However, most of the emissions correlated to proton range are in the energy range of 4~10 MeV, and there are no practical detectors available for prompt gamma detection. Currently the only practical approach is the PET imaging of proton induced position emitters 9-15. In this review the current status of investigations on PET verification of proton therapy and the quantitative methods used are discussed.…”

Use of short-lived positron emitters for in-beam and real-time β+ range monitoring in proton therapy

“…A Beam ON-LINE PET system (BOLPs-RGp) [11] has been developed and mounted on a rotating gantry port at the National Cancer Center, (Kashiwa, Japan), since October 2007. This system measures annihilation gamma rays of slow-decaying isotopes (mostly 10 C, 11 C, 15 O, 14 O and 13 O) generated from the irradiated volume in a patient body during proton therapy from the start of the irradiation to 200 s after the end of irradiation [12,13]. The INSIDE (INnovative Solution for In-beam Dosimetry in hadronthErapy) project was created with the goal of building a bi-modal system to perform online monitoring in hadrontherapy [14][15][16][17].…”

Application of activity pencil beam algorithm using measured distribution data of positron emitter nuclei for therapeutic SOBP proton beam

“…2,3 Some clinical analyses of clinical proton-irradiated volume were reported by verifying the patient data measured by BOLPs-RGp. 1,4 Human body is mostly composed of five elements: H, C, N, O, and Ca. It is known that reaction cross section of 14 N(p, α) 11 C reaction is over 200 mb only around proton beam range (just before a beam stop) 5 .…”

“…A lot of reports on phantom studies, simulation studies, patients studies and so on for proton therapy have been published. 1,4,[7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] Some hospitals and facilities use pencil beam scanning for proton therapy and others use broad beam as spread-out Bragg peak (SOBP) beam. SOBP for the uniform dose distribution in the depth direction is the sum of several Bragg peaks made by a proton beam passing through bar-ridge filter (RF) or range modulators at staggered depths.…”