Compact cancer-therapy particle-delivery syste...( UPTON NY As part of an effort to ma...),Health
UPTON, NY As part of an effort to make high-precision particle cancer therapy accessible to more patients, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory has developed a simpler, less-expensive gantry design for delivering tumor-killing particle beams. Brookhaven Science Associates, the company that manages the Lab for DOE, has applied for a U.S. non-provisional patent on the design, which is now available for licensing and commercial development.
"This design uses smaller magnets to steer and focus the beams, which greatly reduces the cost, weight, and size of the particle-delivery system and simplifies its operation," said inventor Dejan Trbojevic, an accelerator physicist at Brookhaven Lab. "Since the beam-delivery system is the most expensive piece of equipment at a particle cancer-therapy facility, this new design could make such facilities more economical to build and operate, thus making particle therapy accessible to more cancer patients around the world."
Unlike conventional radiation beams, which deposit energy as they travel through healthy tissue on the way to internal tumors, particle beams made of protons or charged ions, such as carbon, deposit most of their energy at the cancerous tumor. Thus, precisely aimed particle beams have more cancer-killing potential in fewer doses, and with less damage to healthy tissues, than conventional radiation.
But particle cancer-therapy facilities are expensive to build, in large part due to the size and complexity of the beam-delivery systems. One challenge is that the particle dose has to be delivered to patients from various positions, and with very good reliability and stability, with the whole device rotating around the patient while staying focused on the tumor. In such a machine, size and weight matter.
Recent advances in particle accelerator design have resulted in the use of smaller and less complex magnets. Trbojevic, who has wor
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| Contact: Karen McNulty Walsh kmcnulty@bnl.gov 631-344-8350 DOE/Brookhaven National Laboratory Source:Eurekalert |
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