Development of a method for accelerating the emission of prompt gammas
Recrutement:
Recrutement en cours/passé:
Recrutement en cours
Periode:
2023-2034
Contact:
CREATIS : Jean Michel Létang <jean.letang@creatis.insa-lyon.fr> — IP2I : Étienne Testa <e.testa@ip2i.in2p3.fr>
Fichiers:
Context:
Hadrontherapy is an emerging technique for treating cancerous tumours using ion beams. The main therapeutic indications for this technique are the treatment of tumours that are radioresistant and/or located near organs at risk, and the treatment of tumours in children. Hadrontherapy makes it possible to treat tumours while sparing healthy tissue more effectively than conventional radiotherapy using gamma rays. To make the most of the advantages of this technique, a great deal of research is currently being carried out all over the world to develop systems to control the range of the ions and ensure that the treatments are delivered as planned by the treatment planning systems. The detection of prompt gamma rays (PG) emitted during nuclear reactions by a fraction of the incident ions is one of the main techniques being studied. The distribution of emission points for these prompt gamma rays is closely correlated with the path of the ions.
In parallel with the development of PG detection systems, Monte Carlo simulation tools are being developed (notably Geant4/GATE) to compare experimental data with theoretical predictions and to design and optimise control systems. With regard to the detection of prompt gamma rays for hadrontherapy monitoring, a tool for the rapid simulation of gamma ray emission in a voxelized geometry has recently been developed by the CREATIS-IP2I collaboration: the vpgTLE or voxelized prompt-gamma track length estimator module. The current module simulates the emission of PGs with the spatial, energy and time information of the emitted PG. An initial study has led to a preliminary version of the code.
Aim:
The aim of the proposed internship is to take up the modelling initially proposed by El Kanawati et al. (2015) to implement in the Monte Carlo simulation tool GATE a variant of the vpgTLE module by integration on energy loss instead of track length. A contribution to the writing of an article is planned. A PhD is envisaged.
Reference:
- El Kanawati, W., Létang, J. M., Dauvergne, D., Pinto, M., Sarrut, D., Testa, É. & Freud, N. (2015), ‘Monte Carlo simulation of prompt γ-ray emission in proton therapy using a specific track length estimator’, Physics in Medicine and Biology 60(20), 8067–8086.