Opportunistic dose amplification for proton and carbon ion therapy via capture of internally generated thermal neutrons
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Date
2018-11-02
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer Nature
Abstract
This paper presents Neutron Capture Enhanced Particle Therapy (NCEPT), a method for enhancing the radiation dose delivered to a tumour relative to surrounding healthy tissues during proton and carbon ion therapy by capturing thermal neutrons produced inside the treatment volume during irradiation. NCEPT utilises extant and in-development boron-10 and gadolinium-157-based drugs from the related field of neutron capture therapy. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate that a typical proton or carbon ion therapy treatment plan generates an approximately uniform thermal neutron field within the target volume, centred around the beam path. The tissue concentrations of neutron capture agents required to obtain an arbitrary 10% increase in biological effective dose are estimated for realistic treatment plans, and compared to concentrations previously reported in the literature. We conclude that the proposed method is theoretically feasible, and can provide a worthwhile improvement in the dose delivered to the tumour relative to healthy tissue with readily achievable concentrations of neutron capture enhancement drugs. © 2024 The Authors published by Springer Nature Limited. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Description
Keywords
Doses, Protons, Carbon ions, Therapy, Thermal neutrons, Neutrons, Gadolinium, Monte Carlo Method, Simulation, Neoplasms, Radiation dose ranges, Scattering
Citation
Safavi-Naeini, M., Chacon, A., Guatelli, S., Franklin, D. R., Bambery, K., Gregoire, M.-C., & Rosenfeld, A. (2018). Opportunistic dose amplification for proton and carbon ion therapy via capture of internally generated thermal neutrons. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 16257. doi:10.1038/s41598-018-34643-w