Author: Claereboudt, Y.
Paper Title Page
WEPF08 Dosimetry of Pulsed Beams in Proton Therapy 548
 
  • J. van de Walle, Y. Claereboudt, G. Krier, D. Prieels
    IBA, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
  • G. Boissonnat, J. Colin, J.-M. Fontbonne
    LPC, Caen, France
 
  Ion Beam Applications (IBA) has developed in recent years the ProteusONE proton therapy system, which aims at reducing the cost and footprint of proton therapy systems, making them affordable and accessible to more patients worldwide. The heart of the ProteusONE system is a super conducting synchro-cyclotron (S2C2), which provides short (10 μs) proton bunches at 1 kHz. This is in contrast to the proton therapy systems including the IBA Cyclone230, which delivers a continuous beam. Nevertheless, the same average dose rates are provided by both systems. As a consequence, the instantaneous dose rates with the S2C2 are much higher and recombination losses in the large area beam diagnostics and dosimetry devices become non negligible. Since the proton charge which is send to a patient should be measured with high precision, these recombination losses have to be addressed carefully. In this work, a large area (30x30 cm2) and large gap (>3 mm) ionization chamber (IC) is presented which allows to quantify recombination losses in each beam pulse on-line. The principle is based on the introduction of two ionization volumes in series with slightly different gap sizes. The ratio of detected charges in both IC's is the basic observable which is used to recalculate the efficiency of each IC. The principle of this so-called "asymmetric ionization chamber" (AIC) was tested with beam from the S2C2 prototype. The results show that the efficiency can be re-calculated to 0.5% precision for voltages higher than 1000 V. Together with the experimental results, the theoretical background of the recombination losses will be discussed and it will be shown how this theory is applied in a robust and simple way to correct for these losses in the proton therapy system.  
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