The Galileo Galilei Award in Medical Physics is given every year to the best paper published in the European Journal of Medical Physics in the previous year.
The journal has just announced that this year the paper “Technical challenges for FLASH proton therapy” by Drs Simon Jolly and Marco Schippers, as well as CI experts Dr Hywel Owen and Professor Carsten P Welsch, published in Physica Medica, Volume 78, October 2020 has been elected the best paper published in the journal in the year 2020.
The selection of the best paper has been performed on the basis of citations and downloads together with the assessment by the Editors, Associate Editors and members of the Editorial Board.
The journal published the following statement: “In this paper the authors performed a comprehensive and systematic study and analysis of the technical challenges posed by the accelerator technology in order to be able to deliver FLASH proton therapy. Particular attention was given to FLASH proton delivery methods concluding that the hybrid approaches employing a combination of the scattering and scanning methods, particularly the use of scanned beams with patient-specific range modulators, are likely to method of choice for clinical proton FLASH delivery. Their work can be regarded as one of the major step towards the clinical implementation of the FLASH treatments using protons.“
The four researchers were all members of the pan-European OMA network which facilitated the collaborative research. Study leader Dr Simon Jolly said: “It is an honour and a privilege for us to receive this award. We are absolutely delighted that both our work on FLASH proton therapy and the burgeoning field of FLASH radiotherapy has been recognised in this way. It is a pleasure to share this award with a team of authors who have contributed so much to the field of accelerator physics, in particular the applications of medical accelerators.”
Congrats to the winners of the Galileo Galilei Award 2020!
Article reference:
Technical challenges for FLASH proton therapy
Simon Jolly, Hywel Owen, Marco Schippers and Carsten Welsch
Physica Medica 78, 71 – 82 (October 2020)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejmp.2020.08.005