The high cost of particle accelerators compared with X-ray technology kept protons out of mainstream healthcare for many years. Interest is growing in proton technology, though, as evidenced by the opening of dedicated clinical proton-therapy facilities in the US, Japan and Europe. Trouble is, sites must generally allow for a purpose-built room to house the accelerator, and then run multiple treatment rooms for the technology to be commercially viable - a requirement that restricts take-up to large clinical institutions.
One option for shrinking the cost of proton therapy is simply to build a smaller, lighter accelerator using conventional technology. This is the approach being taken by Still River Systems, with a compact proton-therapy system powered by a synchrocyclotron (a cyclotron in which the frequency of the driving RF electric field is varied to compensate for the mass gain of the accelerated particles).
Scaling a 2 T cyclotron to 10 T means that it goes from weighing 450 tonnes to less than 20 tonnes, according to Kenneth Gall, co-founder and CTO of Still River Systems. Essentially this is what Gall and his team have done, using superconductors as the basis for the 10 T electromagnet.
If the technology can be commercialized, the result will be an accelerator, just a couple of metres across, which can be mounted on a gantry in a similar fashion to the familiar linac set-up.
"We are excited to report this technical breakthrough," said Gall. "While magnets of this strength are already in use in medical applications, the challenge has been to operate a cyclotron at this very large magnetic field."
• Still River Systems is teaming up with Varian Medical Systems to develop an interface between Varian's ARIA oncology information system and the Monarch250. Engineers from the two companies will work together to develop the interface to allow important "record and verify" functionality across the two systems.
The ARIA system manages the clinical processes associated with radiotherapy treatments, aggregating patient data into a single, organized, oncology-specific medical chart. Varian says that it aims to "bring the familiar workflow, look and feel of ARIA into the proton environment, to ease the transition of staff from conventional radiotherapy to proton therapy".