Ponente
Descripción
Proton therapy has become a promising technique for cancer treatment, specifically targeting tumors and minimizing the impact on surrounding healthy tissues. Despite its benefits, there is uncertainty in the verification of the proton range, which implies higher doses in adjacent healthy tissues, this leads to use of wide safety margins in the doses, limiting the total potential of the technique. To reduce this uncertainty and infer the real range of the protons, F. Hueso proposes in his work [Hueso 2020], the determination of the Bragg peak through the count rate in a detector located coaxially to the patient, using the gamma prompts emitted by the patient after interaction with the proton beam.
The PRIDE project wants to apply this method but with the simultaneous detection and discrimination of neutrons and gamma. So far, we have used a non-commercial pure LaCl3 scintillator with excellent neutron-gamma discrimination and energy resolution [Vuong2021] provided by our collaborators Phan Quoc Vuong and Hongjoo Kim from the Department of Physics at Kyungpook National University (South Korea).
In this contribution we will present a series of measurements made in local facilities with 4-6 MeV alpha particles in a Be9 target (CMAM Jun-2023), evaluating the sensitivity of the detector to neutrons and gammas using pulse shape discrimination and comparing the results obtained with Monte Carlo simulation made in Geant4.
[Hueso2020] F. Hueso-Gonzalez and T. Bortfeld, IEEE Trans Radiat Plasma Med. Sci. 4, p. 170 (2020)
[Vuong2021] P. Vuong, H. Kim et al., Nuclear Engineering and Technology 53, p. 3784 (2021)
