Investigations on physical and biological range uncertainties in Krakow proton beam therapy centre

TL;DR

This paper explores methods to reduce range uncertainties in proton beam therapy through software development of a GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo simulation and investigation of plastic scintillator PET detectors for therapy monitoring.

Contribution

It introduces a GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo toolkit for pre-clinical simulation and evaluates plastic scintillator PET detectors for proton therapy range verification.

Findings

Successful development of the Fred Monte Carlo toolkit.

Feasibility demonstrated for plastic scintillator PET detectors in range monitoring.

Preliminary PET image reconstruction results show potential for clinical application.

Abstract

Physical and biological range uncertainties limit the clinical potential of Proton Beam Therapy (PBT). In this proceedings, we report on two research projects, which we are conducting in parallel and which both tackle the problem of range uncertainties. One aims at developing software tools and the other at developing detector instrumentation. Regarding the first, we report on our development and pre-clinical application of a GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo (MC) simulation toolkit Fred. Concerning the letter, we report on our investigations of plastic scintillator based PET detectors for particle therapy delivery monitoring. We study the feasibility of Jagiellonian-PET detector technology for proton beam therapy range monitoring by means of MC simulations of the $\beta^+$ activity induced in a phantom by proton beams and present preliminary results of PET image reconstruction. Using a GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo simulation toolkit Fred and plastic scintillator based PET detectors we aim to improve patient treatment quality with protons.