Prompt gamma imaging with a slit camera for real time range control in particle therapy

In a growing number of cutting edge centres around the world, radiotherapy treatments delivered by beams of protons and carbon ions offer the opportunity to target tumours with unprecedented conformality. But a sharper dose distribution increases the need for efficient quality control. Treatments are still affected by uncertainties on the penetration depth of the beam within the patient, requiring medical physicists to add safety margins. To reduce these margins and deliver safer treatments, different projects investigate real time range control by imaging prompt gammas emitted along the proton or carbon ion tracks in the patient.This thesis reports on the feasibility, development and test of a new type of prompt gamma camera for proton therapy. This concept uses a knife-edge slit collimator to obtain a 1-dimensional projection of the beam path on a gamma camera. It was optimized, using the Monte Carlo code MCNPX version 2.5.0, to select high energy photons correlated with the beam range and detect them with both high counting statistics and sufficient spatial resolution for use in clinical routine. To validate the Monte Carlo model, spectrometry measurements of secondary particles emitted by a PMMA target during proton irradiation at 160 MeV were realised. An excellent agreement with the simulations was observed when using subtraction methods to isolate the gammas in direct incidence. A first prototype slit camera using the HiCam gamma detector was consequently prepared and tested successfully at 100 and 160 MeV beam energies. If we neglect electronic dead times and rejection of detected events, the current solution with its collimator at 15 cm from beam axis can achieve a 1-2 mm standard deviation on range estimation in a homogeneous PMMA target for numbers of protons that correspond to doses in water at Bragg peak as low as 15 cGy at 100 MeV and 25 cGy at 160 MeV assuming pencil beams with a Gaussian profile of 5 mm sigma at target entrance.This thesis also investigates the applicability of the slit camera for carbon ion therapy. On the basis of Monte Carlo simulations with the code MCNPX version 2.7.E, this type of camera appears not to be able to identify the beam range with the required sensitivity. The feasibility of prompt gamma imaging itself seems questionable at high beam energies given the weak correlation of secondaries leaving the patient.This work consequently concludes to the relevance of the slit camera approach for real time range monitoring in proton therapy, but not in carbon ion therapy.Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur