A New Weapon Against Cancer Cells - The Bergen Proton CT Detector Has Been Successfully Tested

The essence of hadron therapy is that a beam of ions consisting of heavy particles (protons, helium, carbon) can be focused more precisely on cancerous tissues than conventional X-ray or electron-based radiation therapy. This means that healthy cells receive a lower dose, and even organs that would be risky to treat with conventional radiation therapy devices can be treated. Proton CT enables a new type of imaging diagnosis of the target area, ensuring even more precise dose planning.

Despite these advantages, hadron therapy is very expensive and requires closer medical supervision than conventional radiation therapy, which is why it is not widely used. The goal of the Bergen Proton CT project is to develop, through international collaboration, a prototype detector for a hadron therapy device optimized for cancer treatment that eliminates the drawbacks of currently used detectors.

The Bergen team has made significant progress in beam testing. This has enabled project participants to verify the detector’s operation through various measurements in the beam where the final system will operate. We have gained valuable insights into the system’s operation, and now we can begin processing the first data,” said Gábor Bíró, a researcher at the HUN-REN Wigner Research Center for Physics. We are already eager to test the artificial intelligence algorithms developed on the supercomputers of the Wigner Scientific Computing Laboratory in parallel with the detector construction.

Planning began nearly a decade ago at a conference at CERN, where Dieter Röhrich and Gergely Gábor Barnaföldi discussed the potential application of our silicon-based pixel detectors from the CERN ALICE collaboration in cancer treatment. This marked the start of the project, which was supported by Norway and led to the establishment of a hadron therapy center and a research project at the University of Bergen.

Researchers at the HUN-REN Wigner Research Center for Physics played a key role in developing the detector’s cooling system (Ákos Sudár), testing the silicon-based pixel detectors (Mónika Varga-Kőfaragó, Zsófia Jólesz), the data acquisition system (Tivadar Kiss, Ernő Dávid), and the development of proton-based imaging (Gábor Bíró, Ákos Sudár, Zsófia Jólesz), who are also collaborating with researchers from ELTE TTK (Gábor Papp, Bence Dudás).

More information on hadron therapy is available here:

https://epa.oszk.hu/04700/04711/00073/pdf/EPA04711_nover_2022_04.pdf

https://www.uib.no/en/ift/142356/medical-physics-bergen-pct-project