Future Particle Accelerator Developments for Radiation Therapy

Abstract

During the last decade particle beam cancer therapy has seen a rapid increase in interest, and several new centers have been built, are currently under construction, or are in an advanced stage of planning. Typical treatment centers today consist of an accelerator capable of producing proton or ion beams in an energy range of interest for medical treatment, i.e. providing a penetration depth in water of about 30 cm, a beam delivery system to transport the produced beam to the patient treatment rooms, and several patient stations, allowing for an optimal usage of the continuously produced beam. This makes these centers rather large and consequently expensive. Only major hospital centers situated in an area where they can draw on a population of several million can afford such an installation. In order to spread the use of particle beam cancer therapy to a broader population base it will be necessary to scale down the facility size and cost. This can in principle be done by reducing the number of treatment rooms to one, eliminating the need of an elaborate beam delivery system, and thereby reducing the building size and cost. Such a change should be going in parallel with a reduction of the accelerator itself, and a number of approaches to this are currently being pursued. If successful, such developments could eventually lead to a compact system where all components would fit into a single shielded room, not much different in size from a typical radiation vault for radiotherapy with X-rays.