Medical Physics Seminar – Monday, February 13, 2012
Treatment Planning, Optimization, and Beam Delivery Techniques for Intensity Modulated Proton Therapy
Evan Sengbusch (student of Dr. T. Rockwell Mackie)
Research Assistant, Department of Medical Physics, UW-School of Medicine & Public Health, Madison, WI - USA -
Protons enjoy a theoretical advantage over photons in radiation therapy for the treatment of cancer due to the physical properties of their interactions with matter. Although the use of proton therapy has increased over the previous decade, this modality is still only available to a very small fraction of radiotherapy patients. New IMPT treatment planning methods will be introduced that include optimization over gantry angle, the number of delivery angles, beamlet spot size and spacing, beamlet weight, and the number of nonzero weighted beamlets included in the final dose distribution. These techniques will be evaluated against helical tomotherapy through a series of planning studies including lung SBRT, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, and whole brain radiotherapy with hippocampal avoidance. Improvements in dose distributions and in the plans efficiency and deliverability will be discussed.