Description
Center for Proton Therapy at Paul Scherrer Institut
Introduction: Although rapidly growing, proton therapy is a limited resource, which is not available to all the patients who may benefit from it. In this study, we investigate if combined proton-photon treatments, in which some fractions are delivered with protons and the rest with photons, improve on single-modality treatments. Combined treatment can be motivated by the consideration that,...
Introduction
Recent research has shown the feasibility to combine the respective dosimetric advantages of photon and electron beams to achieve superior treatment plan quality (mixed beam radiotherapy MBRT) in comparison to pure photon therapy. Tumor treatment with proton beams on the other hand has distinct benefits in terms of reduced integral dose to a patient compared to photon beams. The...
Introduction: The Christie NHS Foundation Trust began treating patients using proton therapy in Dec. 2018. As part of the current patient specific quality assurance, each proton field is delivered to a SolidWater (SW) phantom (1 hour for preparation/analysis per patient plus 2 hours of beam time per plan). Monte Carlo (MC) based independent dose calculations have been proposed to reduce...
Introduction: Motion management is crucial when applying scanned proton therapy to lung tumours. In order to mitigate
the detrimental motion effects, it is important to know the deformable motion of the patient’s lungs during
treatment. To date, no real-time 3D imaging modality is available, which is why a surrogate for the motion
is needed. This study investigates the predictive power of...
Introduction: With proton therapy, high dose conformity to the target can be achieved while sparing normal tissues, which makes it especially suitable for non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. On the other hand, the proton dose is sensitive to density changes in the beam path and the anatomy of NSCLC patients often changes between fractions (fast tumor growth/shrinkage, weight...
