Medical Physics and Biophysics

Although particle therapy, particularly proton therapy is not a new technology having been initiated in 1952 at the University of California at Berkeley cyclotron, it may be considered relatively new and certainly medical physicists are less familiar with the clinical practice of particle therapy due to the scarcity of facilities worldwide. At last accounting, there were 67 facilities in operation worldwide with another 49 under construction and a small fraction of the several thousands of linear accelerator Xray therapy facilities. As charged particles interact with matter in fundamentally different ways than neutral particles, the planning and delivery of particle therapy requires a unique intuition based both on physics and on radiation biology. This presentation will discuss the therapy, radiation machine design, radiation biology and clinical techniques relevant to particle therapy.