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OMA Topical Workshop on Facility Design Optimization for Treatment

The Optimization of Medical Accelerators (OMA) project, coordinated by Prof Carsten Welsch, member of the Cockcroft Institute and Head of the Liverpool Physics Department, held its 1st OMA Topical Workshop on 12th  – 13th  March 2018 at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland. Approximately thirty delegates attended this event, amongst them several OMA fellows, who presented and discussed the current status of their projects.

This workshop focused on “Facility Design Optimization for Treatment”, linking two of the three OMA working packages: Patient Treatment Optimization and Facility Design and Optimization. The workshop programme consisted of invited and contributed talks by experts from OMA partner institutions and talks by OMA fellows.

The first day workshop was dedicated to review and discuss the state-of-the-art of Monte Carlo techniques applied to medical imaging and dose delivery calculations for treatment planning. After a short welcome by Cockcroft researcher and QUASAR deputy head leader Dr Javier Resta López the workshop started/continued with presentations on simulation examples using the codes GEANT4 and FLUKA. Special attention was dedicated to innovative patient scanning systems including 3D motion detection were also presented as well as novel tumor tracking techniques in particle therapy.

During the second day workshop most presentations were focused on the design and optimization of facilities, including the design of more compact gantries based on superconducting elements and the design of new high performance and compact proton LINACs. There was also space to talk on the design and optimization of control software towards a more reliable and friendly facility operation interface and relevant data storage.

During this event, OMA fellows had the opportunity to meet again to interchange ideas and establish collaborations between them, having the alpine mountains surrounded PSI as titanic witnesses.

More information:

https://indico.cern.ch/event/697187/overview

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 675265.