March 15th - Imaging technique
Webinar
Imaging technique for dose monitoring in carbon therapy of cancer
interventi
Vincenzo Patera, Dipartimento di Scienze di base e applicate per l’ingegneria
Alessio Sarti, Dipartimento di Scienze di base e applicate per l’ingegneria
Carbon Ions Radiation Therapy (CIRT) is a tumor treatment technique that makes use of the highly conformal dose release of carbon ions to spare the Organs at Risk surrounding the target volume while achieving a very high tumor control probability.
The potential of CIRT treatments is however not yet fully exploited due to the range uncertainties that affect the dose absorption inside the patient tissues: carbon ions have a ballistic precision, but their range depends on the density of the tissues traversed by the beam. The are several sources of uncertainties that have to be considered during the treatment planning and for this reasons the target volume ends up receiving a larger dose prescription to avoid a sub-optimal efficacy of the treatment.
A dose monitoring technology will allow to maintain the same treatment efficacy, reducing the overall dose and hence also the collateral dose to organs at risk. To this aim, secondary radiation (e.g. protons) emitted by the beam fragmentation inside the patient tissues can be exploited to monitor the beam range inside the patient. However the number of secondary fragments is limited, and charged particles undergo absorption and multiple scattering interactions in their path towards the monitoring detector from their production point. To reach the needed resolution while monitoring CIRT treatments using secondary charged fragments, a fast MonteCarlo software is needed, to study the interaction of protons with the patient tissues and correct for the absorption undergone by the fragments. The unfolding problem requires large statistics and fast algorithms: a GPU implementation of the protons interaction with matter has been used to speedup 1000 times the algorithms execution finally opening the path towards an online monitoring of the Bragg Peak position. In this seminar we will review the state of the art in the dose monitoring techniques and illustrate the current limits of the imaging techniques, as well as the prospect to address them exploiting the parallel computing power.
lunedì 15 marzo 2021, ore 15.00 - 17.00
Per partecipare occorre collegarsi tramite la piattaforma Zoom