TL;DR
This paper reviews the development and future challenges of high-frequency linacs for proton therapy, emphasizing their advantages, current applications, and the need for more compact and power-efficient designs.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution, current state, and future trends of linacs in medical proton therapy, highlighting key technical challenges.
Findings
High-frequency linacs enable continuous energy variation for precise tumor targeting.
Current projects demonstrate successful application in proton therapy.
Future challenges include reducing footprint and improving power efficiency.
Abstract
High-frequency hadron-therapy linacs have been studied for the last 20 years and are now being built for dedicated proton-therapy centres. The main reason for using high-frequency linacs, in spite of the small apertures and low-duty cycle, is the fact that, for such applications, beam currents of the order of a few nA and energies of about 200 MeV are sufficient. One of the main advantages of linacs, pulsing at 200-400Hz, is that the output energy can be continuously varied, pulse-by-pulse, and a moving tumour target can be covered about ten times in 2-3 minutes by deposing the dose in many thousands of 'spots'. Starting from the first proposal and the on-going projects related to linacs for medical applications, a discussion of the trend of this field is presented focussing, in particular, on the main challenges for the future, such as the reduction of the footprint of compact…
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