Microbeam Radiation Therapy: Development of Instrumentation and Software Tools for Quality Assurance
Abstract
Despite constant advancements in the treatment of cancer using chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and surgical intervention, the rate of survival for patients with head-and-neck cancers has remained steady at 30% for almost 30 years in Australia. Microbeam Radiation Therapy (MRT) is a preclinical radiotherapy modality that shows promise in improving positive treatment outcome rates for such patients.\nMRT takes advantage of the specialised properties of synchrotron radiation generated from an insertion device, namely the high intensity and small divergence of the resulting photon beam. This allows the incident photon beam (a.k.a the broadbeam) to be collimated to produce an array of micrometre-width, spatially fractionated, high dose rate microbeams. The resulting shape of the lateral dose profile is that of high dose rate ‘peaks’ separated by low dose rate ‘valleys’. Typical widths and pitch of the microbeams are 25–50 µm and 200–400 µm, respectively.\nBy taking advantage of the Dose-Volume Effect, where the tolerance of normal tissue to radiation damage increases dramatically as the radiation field size decreases, much higher treatment doses may be delivered than possible with conventional radiotherapy techniques. The low divergence of synchrotron radiation allows the microbeam array to maintain its structure even at depth in a patient, which leads to greater preferential damage to tumours and less normal tissue damage, thus leading to better positive treatment outcomes. Combined…
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