Treatment Planning Methods for Efficient Dose Delivery in Radiation Therapy Using Laser Accelerated Particle Beams

Abstract

With laser acceleration it might be possible to reduce the overall costs of radiation therapy with ions. However, the produced particles have some distinct properties that make them different compared to conventionally accelerated ones. Two of these properties are a broader energy spectrum and dose quantization. Therefore conventional spot scanning seems not feasible. Instead, a reduction of the total number of dose spots is necessary. This work presents a method to accomplish this by building clusters of dose points in lateral and depth direction with the use of a multi leaf collimator and broad energy spectra respectively. Preliminary results on lateral clustering show that this can be achieved without sacrificing the treatment plan quality.