Main Page

Welcome to the UCL High Energy Physics Group Proton Beam Therapy Wiki.

This contains information on the various proton therapy-related experiments and software in use by the UCL High Energy Physics and Proton and Advanced RadioTherapy (PART) research groups.

Software and Simulations

The initial purpose of this Wiki was to make the setup and use of software used for proton therapy-related simulations easier for less experience users, primarily the Geant4 simulation package.

The following software is available for use on the UCL HEP Linux Cluster:

• Geant4. Geant4 is a toolkit for the simulation of the passage of particles through matter. Its areas of application include high energy, nuclear and accelerator physics, as well as studies in medical and space science.
• ROOT. ROOT is a modular scientific software framework. It provides all the functionalities needed to deal with big data processing, statistical analysis, visualisation and storage. It is used for the analysis of data produced with the Monte Carlo simulations packages described above.
• BDSIM. BDSIM is a Geant4 extension toolkit for simulation of particle transport in accelerator beamlines. It allows an accelerator to be described by text input file and Geant4 geometry is automatically created based on libraries of generic components. It provides fast in-vacuum thick-lens tracking as well as the full physics processes of Geant4.

More details of the available software can be found on the PBTWiki Software page.

Research

UCL runs a number of research projects related to proton therapy. Most of these are described in more detail on the Proton and Advanced RadioTherapy (PART) research group page.

More detailed information is available on the following research projects:

• Proton Calorimetry: Development of a fast, accurate calorimeter module for high resolution proton energy measurements.
• Clatterbridge Simulations: Simulations of the beamline for the 60MeV ocular proton therapy beam at the Clatterbridge Cancer Centre.
• QA For Radiotherapy: Quality Assurance measurements for radiotherapy PDD and Output Factor measurements using plastic scintillator.
• Quality Assurance: A summary of existing systems used for machine and patient QA in clinical proton therapy facilities.
• Plasma Wakefield Acceleration: Simulations of the proton driven plasma wakefield experiment, AWAKE.

An Archive of Photos taken at various facilities during experimental runs is also available.

Background

For information on the background to proton beam therapy treatment and research at UCL, please see the Background Information page.

A useful table of proton ranges for clinical energies is also available.

For more information on Proton Beam Therapy research at UCL, please contact Dr. Simon Jolly.