Design report of an in-vivo monitoring system for ion-beam radiotherapy made of 28 Timepix3 detectors published in Scientific Reports
![A person standing in a lab.](/media/livacuk/omaproject/images/news/featureimage/InViMo.jpg)
For the past four years, former OMA fellow Dr Laurent Kelleter has been working at the German Cancer Research Centre (DKFZ, Heidelberg, Germany) on a tracking system that is being used as an in-vivo monitoring system in ion-beam radiotherapy. The design and performance reports has just been published in Scientific Reports.
By exploiting the information carried by secondary radiation that is always produced during ion-beam therapy, the tracking system aims to improve the treatment accuracy. This is done by triggering a control CT of the patient if the observed difference between the secondary radiation fields of two treatment fractions cross a pre-defined threshold.
In the report, the system’s spatial resolution for individual particles is quantified as 4 mm along the beam axis. Moreover, it can easily resolve sub-millimetre beam range shifts that spread over a larger area.
For now, the tracking system is being used in the InViMo (in-vivo monitoring) clinical trial at the Heidelberg Ion Beam Therapy Centre (HIT, Heidelberg, Germany) for patients suffering from cancer near the skull base and treated with carbon-ion radiotherapy. Future plans are to expand the application to other tumour indications in the head as well as to other ion species (helium and oxygen).