Adjustment procedure for beam alignment in scanned ion-beam therapy

Abstract

Control of the beam position for three-dimensional pencil-beam scanning is important because the position accuracy of the beam significantly impacts the alignment of the irradiation field. To suppress this effect, we have developed a simple procedure for beamline tuning. At first, beamline tuning is performed with steering magnets and fluorescent screen monitors to converge the beam’s trajectory to a central orbit. Misalignment between the beam’s position and the reference axis is checked by using the verification system, which consists of a screen monitor and an acrylic phantom. If the beam position deviates from the reference axis, two pairs of steering magnets, which are placed on downstream of the beam transport line, will be corrected. These adjustments are iterated until the deviations for eleven energies of the beam are within 0.5 mm of the reference axis. To demonstrate the success of our procedure, we used our procedure to perform beam commissioning at the Kanagawa Cancer Center.