Erlangen 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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ST: Fachverband Strahlen- und Medizinphysik

ST 5: Focus Session: Range Verification in Particle Therapy

ST 5.1: Hauptvortrag

Donnerstag, 19. März 2026, 11:00–11:30, KH 01.013

Prompt-Gamma-Based Range Verification — •Beatrice Foglia — Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Department of Medical Physics, Garching b. Muenchen, Germany

Prompt gammas (PG) are high-energy (~MeV) photons emitted immediately after nuclear interactions of ions with matter along nearly the entire beam path. As such, PG emission can provide valuable information on the ion beam range, making it a promising tool for in vivo range verification. Their nanosecond-scale emission and detection enable real-time monitoring, which is particularly attractive for adaptive therapy and is driving strong interest in the radio- and hadrontherapy community. Since the first proposal by Stichelbaut and Jongen at the PTCOG meeting in 2003, PG-based range verification has become a topic of worldwide research interest. Several workflows have been developed, generally relying on comparisons between measured PG profiles and expected signals obtained from Monte Carlo simulations or analytical models. Various PG detection modalities have been proposed and optimized to address challenges such as low PG yields and the broad, high-energy PG spectrum. Moreover, although PG emission and dose deposition arise from different physical processes, recent studies have demonstrated the feasibility of reconstructing dose distributions from PG signals. This talk will provide an overview of widely used PG-based range verification workflow, PG detection modalities and analytical PG modeling, and recent advances extending PG applications beyond range verification toward dose reconstruction and adaptive treatment strategies will be discussed.

Keywords: prompt gammas; range verification; monitoring; hadrontherapy; adaptive therapy