Published in MPW, 9 Dec 2014
Researchers in the US have demonstrated a method for verifying the range of proton-therapy beams that’s accurate to nearly one millimetre. They believe that a full-scale system could improve the accuracy by an order of magnitude, which would open up new treatment plans for difficult cancers such as lung and prostate (Phys. Med. Biol. 59 7089).
In principle, proton therapy’s main benefit over other types of radiotherapy, such as X-ray and electron therapy, is that the protons have a very finite range, and can therefore be focused on malignant tumours without overly affecting surrounding healthy tissue. In practice, however, it is difficult to pinpoint where this sharp cut-off occurs. […]
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