简介: |
With widely recognized clinical benefits, proton therapy is moving to the world stage with many new proton centers established in the US and elsewhere just in the last few years and with many more under construction or in planning. Massachusetts General Hospital, a teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, has been the leader in the development and clinical practice of this advanced radiotherapy treatment technique since 1960s. The presentation will briefly review the history of proton therapy and its recent advancements at MGH. We will also discuss the main challenges in the field of proton therapy and the various efforts by the medical physics group at MGH to meet these challenges, including Monte-Carlo simulation, in-vivo beam range verification, respiratory gating, intensity modulated proton therapy, proton radiography and tomography, etc. Application of these techniques to treatment of breast cancer and prostate cancer will be discussed as clinical examples. |