Design and commissioning of a high-level control system for a medical isochronous cyclotron

TL;DR

This paper describes the development and commissioning of a new high-level control system for the MEDICYC isochronous cyclotron, enhancing its operation, monitoring, and fault detection capabilities for medical proton therapy.

Contribution

A novel high-level control system architecture was designed and implemented for the MEDICYC cyclotron, improving coordination and data analysis for medical and research applications.

Findings

Successful commissioning of the new control system in 2024

Enhanced monitoring and fault detection capabilities implemented

Improved coordination of cyclotron subsystems achieved

Abstract

MEDICYC (MEDical CYClotron) is an isochronous cyclotron dedicated to radiotherapy which was built and commissioned in Nice, France, in 1990 by a local team aided by experts from CERN. The cyclotron accelerates negative H to a maximum energy of 65 MeV and uses stripping to extract a proton beam. Its primary purpose is treating ocular melanoma by protontherapy but a significant research activity is also present on beam-lines dedicated for this purpose. An extensive refurbishment program of the cyclotron has been started to cope with the end-of-life and/or the obsolescence of several sub-systems. In this context, a new high-level cyclotron control system has been developed and commissioned in 2021-2024. The primary responsibility of the system is the high-level coordination of the source, the RF system, the beam-line and cyclotron magnets, to produce and deliver a beam with a given set of characteristics. A secondary responsibility is the collection, visualization and analysis of sub-system and beam data for monitoring and pre-emptive fault detection. In this contribution, the control system software architecture is presented and the infrastructure on which the systems are deployed is laid out.