f. saheli

The proton induced prompt gamma spectrum is applied for elemental analysis of irradiation tissues. The main purpose of the analysis in proton therapy is to track oxygen concentration in abnormal tissues. Online monitoring of oxygen concentration over a full course of treatment could provide a direct method for evaluating the response of these tissues to proton therapy and this information on the response of the tumor and healthy tissues to irradiation could then be used by the oncologist to adjust the patient’s treatment plan to ensure proper dose delivery to the tumor. In this study, the prompt gamma spectrum of a human eye phantom is simulated in an HPGe detector using the Geant4 toolkit, and the elemental analysis is accomplished using an artificial neural network (ANN). In the analysis, 33 eye phantoms are considered with different tumors, including different densities and elemental compositions. 21 samples were used as train data in ANN and 6 samples for testing and 6 samples for validation. The results show that there is a good correlation between outputs and targets. They show that the error percent of oxygen, carbon, and nitrogen in test samples are less than 5.8, 12.7, and 25%, respectively. Finally, the potential of quantitative elemental analysis of inhomogeneous targets is confirmed for providing a method to track change in the oxygen level of tumors.

nline elemental analysis of irradiated tissue in proton therapy is a major part of this treatment, since it leads to accurate estimation of the depth of Bragg peak, proton range, and distribution of stopping power of irradiated tissue. Given the fact that each element has unique characteristic prompt gamma (PG) spectrum, recording and analyzing of the emitted gamma-ray spectra is one of the methods used for online elemental analysis of irradiated tissue. In the present study, the PG lines of most abundant  elements of human tissues (12C, 16O, 20Ca, and 14N) are obtained using Geant4 toolkit. Moreover, the linear dependency of 7.12, 3.91 and 2.31 MeV PG counts to the mass of 16O, 20Ca, and 14N are investigated in five phantoms. The gamma lines of 2.31, 3.91 and 7.12 MeV are selected to determine the mass of nitrogen, calcium, and oxygen in the irradiated volume. Furthermore, for two test phantoms, the mass of elements is estimated using linear fitting and is compared with predefined mass of these elements in the test phantoms. The results showed that the relative errors of estimated mass of calcium, nitrogen, and oxygen are less than 6%, which leads to the range estimation deviation of about 1 mm.