Objective
Background:
Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) is a new form of radiotherapy expected to be beneficial to cancer patients with glioma, a type of brain tumour. The first European clinical trials with BNCT on glioma patients have started in Petten, The Netherlands, in October 1997. Other European countries, Finland, United Kingdom and Czech Republic, are approaching clinical trials and pre-clinical BNCT-studies are progressing in Portugal and Hungary. To ensure the comparability and critical assessment of the results from pre-clinical radiobiological experiments and from clinical trials on human patients, it is of crucial importance that the basic characteristics of the neutron beam (beam geometry, neutron and gamma-ray spectra, absorbed dose and fluency distributions) are determined in a coherent and repro-ducible way. The existing international recommendations on radiotherapy dosimetry are not applicable to BNCT.
Therefore, accepted dosimetric procedures are urgently needed to provide credibility and reliability for BNCT, to the benefit of the patients and to facilitate the recognition and clinical acceptance of this new treatment modality by the radio-therapeutic community and the national health authorities.
Objectives:
The objective of the project is to prepare detailed guidelines for the dosimetry of epithermal neutrons to be used for BNCT at European research reactors and accelerators. These guidelines will ensure the level of accuracy, reliability and reproducibility, which is generally required in radiotherapy and which will be of crucial importance for the success and optimisation of the BNCT treatments.
Work programme:
The project is limited to the basic problems of the physical dosimetry prior to clinical treatment in order to attain control of the most urgent topics. To meet the objectives, the partners are studying and developing the methodology for the basic BNCT-dosimetry by: i) theoretical review and analysis of the available knowledge; ii) selection of the most promising methods andprocedures; iii) systematic experimental investigations of the most promising methods; iv) verification of experimental results by theoretical calculations in order to determine the critical physical parameters affecting the overall accuracy of themeasurements;v) selection of recommended dosimetry procedures;vi) systematic intercomparison of the selected dosimetry procedures in the available European BNCT beams.
The work is divided into our work packages:1) beam characterisation;2) beam calibration; 3) on-line monitoring; 4) writing of the code.
State of progress:
The partners are currently (December 1998) in the process of reviewing their own dosimetry procedures and other dosimetry procedures world-wide in order to select the most promising procedures for further research.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- medical and health sciences clinical medicine oncology
- natural sciences mathematics pure mathematics geometry
- natural sciences chemical sciences inorganic chemistry metalloids
- natural sciences mathematics applied mathematics mathematical model
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Coordinator
1755 LE Petten
Netherlands
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