First results of the INSIDE in-beam PET scanner for the on-line monitoring of particle therapy treatments

Quality assessment of particle therapy treatments by means of PET systems has been carried out since late '90 and it is one of the most promising in-vivo non invasive monitoring techniques employed clinically. It can be performed with a diagnostic PET scanners installed outside the treatment room (off-line monitoring) or inside the treatment room (in-room monitoring). However the most efficient way is by integrating a PET scanner with the treatment delivery system (on-line monitoring) so that the biological wash out and the patient repositioning errors are minimized. In this work we present the performance of the in-beam PET scanner developed within the INSIDE project. The INSIDE PET scanner is made of two planar heads, 10 cm wide (transaxially) and 25 cm long (axially), composed of pixellated LFS crystals coupled to Hamamatsu MPPCs. Custom designed Front-End Electronics (FE) and Data AcQuisition (DAQ) systems allow an on-line reconstruction of PET images from separated in-spill and inter-spill data sets. The INSIDE PET scanner has been recently delivered at the CNAO (Pavia, Italy) hadrontherapy facility and the first experimental measurements have been carried out. Homogeneous PMMA phantoms and PMMA phantoms with small air and bone inserts were irradiated with monoenergetic clinical proton beams. The activity range was evaluated at various benchmark positions within the field of view to assess the homogeneity of response of the PET system. Repeated irradiations of PMMA phantoms with clinical spread out Bragg peak proton beams were performed to evaluate the reproducibility of the PET signal. The results found in this work show that the response of the INSIDE PET scanner is independent of the position within the radiation field. Results also show the capability of the INSIDE PET scanner to distinguish variations of the activity range due to small tissue inhomogeneities. Finally, the reproducibility of the activity range measurement was within 1 mm.