Towards Offline PET Monitoring at a Cyclotron-Based Proton Therapy Facility / BestMasters (PDF)

Matthias Würl
presents two essential steps to implement offline PET monitoring of proton dose
delivery at a clinical facility, namely the setting up of an accurate Monte
Carlo model of the clinical beamline and the experimental validation of
positron emitter production cross-sections. In the first part, the field size
dependence of the dose output is described for scanned proton beams. Both the
Monte Carlo and an analytical computational beam model were able to accurately
predict target dose, while the latter tends to overestimate dose in normal
tissue. In the second part, the author presents PET measurements of different
phantom materials, which were activated by the proton beam. The results
indicate that for an irradiation with a high number of protons for the sake of
good statistics, dead time losses of the PET scanner may become important and
lead to an underestimation of positron-emitter production yields.

Contents

• Monte Carlo Modeling of a Clinical Proton Beam
  
• Low-Dose Envelope and Field Size Factor
  
• PET
  Activation Studies
  

Target Groups

• Researchers and students in the field of medical
  physics with focus on particle therapy
  
• Medical physicists at proton therapy facilities
  

The Author

Matthias Würl wrote
his Master's Thesis at the chair of Medical Physics at the Ludwig-Maximilians
University Munich. He is now a PhD student at the same department, working on
transmission imaging with laser-accelerated ions.