Proton-boron fusion: A novel technique capable of dose enhancement and on-line monitoring for protontherapy

F. GESER; M. VALENTE

León

Congreso; CIFAB (Congress of Physics and Engineering Applied to Biomedicine) 2019; 2019

Universidad de Guanajuato

Therapy with protons, although proposed several decades ago, has become one of the available cancer treatment modalities around the world. As in every radiotherapy modality, it is desirable to havetrustworthy dose delivery systems, with controlled monitoring of the range during irradiation processes, with the aim of sparing healthy or radiosensitive tissues. Improving the compromise between superficial(beam entrance) and in-tumor doses appears as a feasible way to this aim. In this context, the possibility of theranostics for proton volume to induce a nuclear reaction with the protons (proton-boron fusion,PBF) leading to a final state of three alpha particles with high linear energy transfer (LET), and consequently improving biological long term effects [1,2,3]. This work concerns on the capability of theproton-boron fusion reaction, whose cross section for this application was recently estimated [4], to enhance the deposited energy within a water phantom including regions infused with non-toxic concentrationsof boron. The potential enhancement in physical dose is investigated in terms of proton beam fluence, effective reaction cross section at corresponding depth, and the energy values favorable for the reactionaccording to the excitation function. FLUKA Monte Carlo main code [5,6] was used as transport tool, validated against experimental ionization curves measured at CNAO, Pavia, Italy, to provide trustworthyrange prediction. The compromise between the characteristics surveyed shows that there is a negligible expectation for the therapeutic effect to be of importance, at least for tolerable (non-toxic) tens ofpart-per-millions of infused boron.