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The MedAustron particle therapy accelerator facility

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Abstract

Purpose

MedAustron mission is to cure cancer by providing advanced patient care, clinical trials, applied and basic research, and know-how transfer. The facility is constantly striving to improve the therapy method of ion beam therapy, to increase its effectiveness and to make the treatment accessible to more people.

Methods

The MedAustron particle therapy accelerator facility is located in Austria and delivers protons in the energy range 60–250 MeV and carbon ions 120–400 MeV/n for tumor treatment to four irradiation rooms. Clinical treatment includes two rooms with fixed beam lines horizontal and horizontal/vertical and a third room with a rotating beam line, the proton gantry. A fourth irradiation room is dedicated to research delivering carbon and helium beams and where proton beams up to 800 MeV are also provided.

Results

The facility has been built, the commissioning has been completed and MedAustron is now successfully operating at its full functionality. Since the first patient treatment in December 2016, more than 2,000 patients have been treated at MedAustron.

Conclusions

In this paper, we provide an overview of the facility including the world-wide first so-called rotator system used, synchronously with the gantry, to improve the quality of the beam delivered at the patient. Furthermore, we discuss about the ongoing projects for improvement of the facility, the areas of research and potential topics for collaboration.

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Data availability

The data used to support the findings of this work are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Code availability

Not applicable

References

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Acknowledgements

This article has been written on behalf of the MedAustron Technical Accelerator and the Medical Physics Divisions that we would like to Thank. We are thankful to Michael Benedikt and Ulrich Dorda for the optics design including the rotator and the original gantry optics and to Marco Pullia and Márius Pavlovič for the support with the beam commissioning.

Funding

The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. EBG MedAustron GmbH, Marie-Curie-Straße 5, 2700, Wiener Neustadt, Austria

    Mauro T. F. Pivi

Authors
  1. Mauro T. F. Pivi
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Contributions

All authors contributed to the study conception and design. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Mauro Pivi. The first draft of the manuscript was written by Mauro Pivi. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mauro T. F. Pivi.

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Ethics approval

This study does not involve humans or animals.

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Informed consent

An informed consent to publish has been obtained from all individual mentioned for whom identifying information is included in this article. In particular, informed consent was obtained from the individual Professors of whom names are cited in this article, to publish their identifying information. Informed consent was obtained from the MedAustron Institution to publish the data in the tables and figures of this article. In particular, informed consent has been obtained to publish the data in Fig. 11 of this article.

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The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

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Pivi, M.T.F. The MedAustron particle therapy accelerator facility. Health Technol. (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12553-024-00840-z

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