History of hadron therapy accelerators

A new proton therapy center is planned to be built in Rome, Italy. The project, named TOP-IMPLART, is developed by three institutions, ENEA (Agenzia Nazionale per le Nuove tecnologie, l’Energia e lo Sviluppo Economico Sostenibile - Italian national agency for new technologies, energy and sustainable economic development), ISS (Istituto Superiore di Sanita, Italian National Institute of Health) and IFO-IRE (Istituto Fisioterapico Ospedaliero - Istituto Regina Elena, Regina Elena, National Cancer Institute in Rome). The project is centered on a medium-energy proton accelerator designed as a sequence of linear accelerators. Two phases of construction are foreseen: the first (funded by the Italian Regione Lazio for 11 M€ spread over four years) with a maximum energy of 150 MeV and the second one up to 230 MeV. The segment up to 150 MeV is under construction and will be tested at the ENEA Research Center in Frascati before the transfer to IFO that is the clinical user. The basic concepts of the design are described here.

http://www.frascati.enea.it/accelerators/Repository/TOP-IMPLART/Pubblicazioni/2011/epjp1100112-offprints.pdf

The TOP-IMPLART project

We consider a hybrid acceleration scheme for protons where the laser generated beam is selected in energy and angle and injected into a compact linac, which raises the energy from 30 to 60 MeV. The laser acceleration regime is TNSA and the energy spectrum is determined by the cutoff energy and proton temperature. The dependence of the spectrum on the target properties and the incidence angle is investigated with 2D PIC simulations. We base our work on widely available technologies and on laser with a short pulse, having in mind a facility whose cost is approximately 15 M € . Using a recent experiment as the reference, we choose the laser pulse and target so that the energy spectrum obtained from the 3D PIC simulation is close to the one observed, whose cutoff energy was estimated to be over 50 MeV. Laser accelerated protons in the TNSA regime have wide energy spectrum and broad divergence. In this paper we compare three transport lines, designed to perform energy selection and beam collimation. They are based on a solenoid, a quadruplet of permanent magnetic quadrupoles and a chicane. To increase the maximum available energy, which is actually seen as an upper limit due to laser properties and available targets, we propose to inject protons into a small linac for post-acceleration. The number of selected and injected protons is the highest with the solenoid and lower by one and two orders of magnitude with the quadrupoles and the chicane respectively. Even though only the solenoid enables achieving to reach a final intensity at the threshold required for therapy with the highest beam quality, the other systems will be very likely used in the first experiments. Realistic start-to-end simulations, as the ones reported here, are relevant for the design of such experiments.

High quality proton beams from hybrid integrated laser-driven ion acceleration systems

In the race to obtain protons with higher energies, using more compact systems at the same time, laser-driven plasma accelerators are becoming an interesting possibility. But for now, only beams with extremely broad energy spectra and high divergence have been produced.

The driving line of this PhD thesis was the study and design of a compact system to extract a high quality beam out of the initial bunch of protons produced by the interaction of a laser pulse with a thin solid target, using experimentally reliable technologies in order to be able to test such a system as soon as possible.

In this thesis, different transport lines are analyzed. The first is based on a high field pulsed solenoid, some collimators and, for perfect filtering and post-acceleration, a high field high frequency compact linear accelerator, originally designed to accelerate a 30 MeV beam extracted from a cyclotron.

The second one is based on a quadruplet of permanent magnetic quadrupoles: thanks to its greater simplicity and reliability, it has great interest for experiments, but the effectiveness is lower than the one based on the solenoid; in fact, the final beam intensity drops by an order of magnitude.

An additional sensible decrease in intensity is verified in the third case, where the energy selection is achieved using a chicane, because of its very low efficiency for off-axis protons.

The proposed schemes have all been analyzed with 3D simulations and all the significant results are presented. Future experimental work based on the outcome of this thesis can be planned and is being discussed now.

Laser driven proton acceleration and beam shaping

High-frequency hadron-therapy linacs have been studied for the last 20 years and are now being built for dedicated proton-therapy centres. The main reason for using high-frequency linacs, in spite of the small apertures and low-duty cycle, is the fact that, for such applications, beam currents of the order of a few nA and energies of about 200 MeV are sufficient. One of the main advantages of linacs, pulsing at 200-400Hz, is that the output energy can be continuously varied, pulse-by-pulse, and a moving tumour target can be covered about ten times in 2-3 minutes by deposing the dose in many thousands of 'spots'. Starting from the first proposal and the on-going projects related to linacs for medical applications, a discussion of the trend of this field is presented focussing, in particular, on the main challenges for the future, such as the reduction of the footprint of compact 'single-room' proton machines and the power efficiency of dual

Future Trends in Linacs

ACLIP is a 3 GHz proton SCL linac designed as a booster for a 30 MeV commercial cyclotron. The final energy is 62 MeV well suitable for the therapy of ocular tumors or for further acceleration (up to 230 MeV) by a second linac in order to treat deep-seated tumours. The possibility of using magnetrons as the source of RF power, to reduce the overall cost of the machine, is one the more relevant features of this project and this investigation is carried out within the frame of a collaboration with e2v (Chelmsford, UK). ACLIP is formed by 5 modules coupled together. The first one (able to accelerate proton from 30 to 35 MeV) has been machined, completely brazed and in December 2008 full power RF tests were performed. In this paper we will review the main features of the linac and discuss the results of the RF measurements carried out on this prototype.

RF high power tests on the first module of the ACLIP LINAC

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

M. Iskander

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

RF high power tests on the first module of the ACLIP LINAC