Seminar: Recent Advances in Clinical Proton Beam Therapy - Exploiting the Benefits of Pencil Beam Scanning

Niek Schreuder, Provision Center for Proton Therapy

All dates for this event occur in the past.

E141 Scott Lab
E141 Scott Lab
201 W. 19th Ave.
Columbus, OH 43210
United States

Abstract

Pencil beam scanning (PBS) is the generic name for delivering the radiation dose to a target using individually controlled small pencil beams of accelerated protons to cover a target in 3 dimensions.  The first proton beam patients were treated with PBS at the PSI facility in Switzerland in 1996 but it took the industry many years to make it available at more facilities.   Today PBS is in routine clinical use in the majority of proton therapy facilities across the globe.    The increased flexibility in shaping the dose which enables a much better dose conformation especially to large and non-contiguous targets, truly revolutionized proton therapy during the last few years.  The general utilization of proton therapy has now been expanded to almost all sites in the body and with robust optimization, which is only possible with PBS, the traditional problems with range uncertainties have also been addressed.  Using intelligent optimization strategies and computer algorithms, treatment plans are now optimized with the perceived uncertainties in mind, rendering the delivered plans robust against unwanted changes and uncertainties in the entire treatment process.    It’s true to say that we can now talk about the certainties in PBS proton beam deliveries which provides the physicians with a vastly improved confidence in the delivered dose to the target.  Another paradigm shift caused by PBS is that we now are faced with the question of which targets will not benefit from proton therapy, rather than the traditional inverse question.

About the Speaker

Niek Schreuder is vice president and chief medical physicist for the Provision Proton Therapy Center in Knoxville, Tennessee.  The Provision Center is the first of its kind in Tennessee and only the second in the Southeast, providing personalized, comprehensive patient care and leading-edge technology, offering one of the most advanced cancer treatments in the world.  Proton therapy is an advanced form of radiation therapy that uses a single beam of high-energy protons to treat various forms of cancer.

Schreuder holds a master of medical physics degree from the University of Stellenbosch Medical School in South Africa and is an American Board of Radiology certified medical physicist.  He is a member of the American Association of Medical Physicists, the American Society for Radiation Oncology and the Proton Therapy Cooperative Group.

Schreuder was previously director of medical physics at the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute (MPRI) and iThemba Labs (formerly the National Accelerator Center) in South Africa.

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