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Wellcome / EPSRC Centre for Interventional and Surgical Sciences

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Image guided proton radiotherapy for lung cancer using proton imaging

This project aims to improve the precision of proton radiotherapy for lung tumour. Lung tumour is an extremely difficult cancer to treat with radiotherapy due to the breathing motion and the presence of critical organ at risk (heart, spine, lungs) near the tumour. This explains the low increases of 5 years survival in the recent decades, from 12.2% in 1975 to 18.7% in 2016. 

Proton therapy promises to improve the treatment accuracy due to the dose deposition profile, highly concentrated at the distal end of the proton range. However, without any accurate image guidance, those benefits may turn to severe detriments as the dose may be delivered to critical healthy organs. Proton radiography prototypes exist that allows to acquire projection images in-room at a high rate (1-5 millisecond acquisition time).

The aim of this work would be to adapt the proton therapy treatment with radiographic images by alternating rapidly between the treatment and the imaging mode. This is expected to improve drastically the treatment accuracy.

The project falls directly within the EPSRC remit as it at the frontier of applied research (the development of proton radiography and proton radiotherapy for lung tumours) and translational research (application in the clinical environment with early prototype). The experimental evaluation on anthropomorphic phantoms will help prove the validity of the technique and the potential dose benefit.

Supervisor

Professor Gary Royle