Dose Delivery Concept and Instrumentation

TL;DR

This paper discusses the principles and instrumentation of dose delivery systems in charged particle radiation therapy, highlighting technological advancements from uniform to highly conformal dose delivery methods.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of dose delivery concepts and compares various instrumentation techniques based on beam delivery methods and particle types.

Findings

Overview of dose delivery system principles

Comparison of traditional and advanced DD systems

Examples of worldwide DD and beam monitor systems

Abstract

Radiation therapy aims to deliver the prescribed amount of dose to a tumour at the same time as sparing the surrounding tissues as much as possible. In charged particle therapy, delivering the prescribed dose is equivalent to delivering the prescribed number of ions of a given energy at each position of the irradiation field. The accurate delivery is committed to a dose delivery (DD) system that shapes, guides and controls the beam before the patient entrance. Most of the early DD systems provided uniform lateral dose profiles by using different devices, mainly patient-specific, placed in the beam line to shape the three-dimensional final target dose. More recently, systems that provide highly conformal dose distributions using thousands of narrow beams at well-defined energy were developed which feature advanced scanning magnets and real-time beam monitors, without patient-specific hardware. This lecture will cover the general dose delivery concept as well as the different DD instrumentations depending mainly on the beam delivery technique and on the particle and accelerator types. Some characteristic worldwide DD and beam monitor systems will be mentioned.