18 December 2018 Burçin Ünlü

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KOÇ UNIVERSITY PHYSICS SEMINAR
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Speaker             : Burçin Ünlü, Boğaziçi University & GI-CoRE, Hokkaido University
Title                     : Range Verification in Proton Therapy
Date                     : December 18, 2018
Time                    : 14:30
Cookie & Tea  : SCI 103 14:15
Place                   : SCI 103
web                       : https://physics-seminars.ku.edu.tr

Abstract:

Radiotherapy is vital for the treatment of cancer and requires high energy photons or particles. One of the challenging problems is to deliver the dose to the tumor with minimum harm to the healthy tissue. Using protons overcomes this difficulty thanks to the charge and mass of the particles.  Proton therapy offers the advantage of delivering high doses to the tumor compared with the conventional photon therapy. Also, better dose distribution, higher relative radio-biological effectiveness and linear energy transfer, and lower oxygen enhancement ratio are critical advantages provided by the proton therapy.

In proton therapy, range verification deals with the monitoring of the location of the Bragg peak.  Nevertheless, the well-defined proton range makes it difficult to monitor the dose in-vivo. The uncertainty in the Bragg peak could cause radiation overdose or under-dose.  To address this issue, several approaches have been developed over the last decade. One of these approaches is the monitoring of the acoustic signals generated by the incident proton beam deposited within the tissue.  This requires the experimental capability to detect millipascal pressure amplitudes. Recently, the first measurement of acoustic signals in a hospital-based clinical cyclotron has been reported.

In my presentation, I will summarize our recent work on range verification using acoustic waves.