Roberto Cirio

INFN - Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare | INFN · Physics Department

The University and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics of Torino are developing LGAD-based prototypes for beam monitoring in proton therapy. The direct measurement of single beam particles could overcome some features of currently used ionization chambers, such as slow charge collection and reduced sensitivity, which limit the implementation...

The MIUR PRIN 4DInSiDe collaboration aims at developing the next generation of 4D (i.e., position and time) silicon detectors based on Low-Gain Avalanche Diodes (LGAD) that guarantee to operate efficiently in the future high-energy physics experiments. To this purpose, different areas of research have been identified, involving the development, des...

A fast 144-channel proton counter prototype, designed for monitoring the fluence rate of clinical proton beams, is based on a thin Low Gain Avalanche Detector (LGAD), segmented into 146 strips (114 μm width, 26,214 μm length, 180 μm pitch). The layout of the sensor was designed in the framework of the Modeling and Verification for Ion beam Treatmen...

A proton counter prototype based on Low Gain Avalanche Detector (LGAD) technology is being developed for the online monitoring of the fluence rate of therapeutic proton beams. The laboratory characterization of thin (45 μm and 60 μm) LGAD sensors segmented in 146 strips with an unprecedented large area of 2.6 × 2.6 cm ² , covering the entire beam c...

A prototype of proton counter was developed by the University and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics of Torino to be used as online fluence beam monitor in particle therapy. The single particle identification approach aims at increasing the sensitivity and readout speed with respect to the state-of-the-art gas ionization chambers. The sensi...

Within the MoveIT-project of the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), the University of Torino (UNITO) and INFN-Torino are developing a detector made of a telescope of two Ultra-Fast Silicon Detectors (UFSD) aligned along the beam direction to determine the energy of clinical proton beams from the measurement of the time-of-flight of sing...

In the framework of the development of future advanced treatment modalities in charged particle therapy, the use of silicon sensors is an appealing alternative to gas ionization chambers commonly used for beam monitoring. A prototype of a device, based on Low-Gain Avalanche Diode (LGAD) sensors with 50μm thickness, is being developed to discriminat...

Beam monitoring in particle therapy is a critical task that, because of the high flux and the time structure of the beam, can be challenging for the instrumentation. Recent developments in thin silicon detectors with moderate internal gain, optimized for timing applications (Ultra Fast Silicon Detectors, UFSD), offer a favourable technological opti...

The University of Torino (UniTO) and the National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN-TO) are investigating the use of Ultra Fast Silicon Detectors (UFSD) for beam monitoring in radiobiological experiments with therapeutic proton beams. The single particle identification approach of solid state detectors aims at increasing the sensitivity and reduc...

The emergent FLASH RadioTherapy (RT) uses ultrahigh dose-rate irradiation (up to 10^7 Gy/s in each μs pulse) to deliver a single high dose of irradiation in a very short time (less than 200 milliseconds). Pre-clinical studies at ultrahigh dose-rates recently showed an increased ratio between tumoricidal effect and normal tissue toxicity (therapeuti...

Purpose: The direct measurement of each beam particle is proposed as a new paradigm for the monitoring of clinical ion beams. To this aim, the results on clinical proton beams of Ultra Fast Silicon Detectors (UFSDs)-based devices are reported. Methods: The capability to detect single protons and the outstanding time resolution (tenths of ps) provid...

Purpose To describe a new system for scanned ion beam therapy, named RIDOS (Real-time Ion DOse planning and delivery System), which performs real time delivered dose verification integrating the information from a clinical beam monitoring system with a Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) based dose calculation in patient Computed Tomography. Methods A b...

Purpose Due to their extra advantages, solid state silicon detectors were initially used in nuclear and particle physics experiments and rapidly gained widespread applications in many different fields (space, medical, etc.). High detection precision, radiation resistance and very good time resolution are their main advantages that overcome many lim...

A 64 channels Application Specific Integrated Circuit, named TERA09, designed in a 0.35 μm technology for particle therapy applications, has been characterized for Single Event Upset probability. TERA09 is a current-to-frequency converter that offers a wide input range, extending from few nA to hundreds of μA, with linearity deviations in the order...

Purpose For beam monitoring in particle therapy, silicon detectors could overcome the limitations of ionization chambers. In particular, silicon sensors with internal gain (Ultra Fast Silicon Detectors, UFSDs) provide high signal-to-noise ratio and fast collection times ( ∼1 ns in 50 μm thickness). A segmented sensor could allow discriminating and...

The MoVeIT project of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) aims at studying, modeling and verifying the biological impact on charged particle therapy of some complex physical and biological effects, so far neglected by treatment planning systems (TPS) currently used. The preclinical testing of biologically optimized TPS requires dedicat...

Purpose. Laboratory characterization of thin strip silicon sensors with internal gain (Ultra Fast Silicon Detectors), developed for beam monitoring applications in particle therapy, has been performed in order to qualify each sensor in terms of leakage current, dead and noisy channels and gain as a function of the bias voltage. Methods. some detect...

Purpose Unlike currently used gas ionization chambers, solid state detectors offer large granularity and sensitivity to single incoming particles, therefore being ideally suited to improve the present technology for beam monitoring in particle therapy. However, several drawbacks, such as radiation damage, prevented their use so far on high flux the...

To fully exploit the physics potentials of particle therapy in delivering dose with high accuracy and selectivity, charged particle therapy needs further improvement. To this scope, a multidisciplinary project (MoVeIT) of the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN) aims at translating research in charged particle therapy into clinical...

We review the progress toward the development of a novel type of silicon detectors suited for tracking with a picosecond timing resolution, the so called Ultra-Fast Silicon Detectors. The goal is to create a new family of particle detectors merging excellent position and timing resolution with GHz counting capabilities, very low material budget, ra...

In this paper we report on the timing resolution obtained in a beam test with pions of 180 GeV/c momentum at CERN for the first production of 45 μm thick Ultra-Fast Silicon Detectors (UFSD). UFSD are based on the Low-Gain Avalanche Detector (LGAD) design, employing n-on-p silicon sensors with internal charge multiplication due to the presence of a...

Charged particle therapy delivered using scanned pencil beams shows the potential to produce better dose conformity than conventional radiotherapy, although the dose distributions are more sensitive to anatomical changes and patient motion. Therefore, the introduction of engines to monitor the dose as it is being delivered is highly desirable, in o...

The Ultra Fast Silicon Detectors (UFSD) are a novel concept of silicon detectors based on the Low Gain Avalanche Diode (LGAD) technology, which are able to obtain time resolution of the order of few tens of picoseconds. First prototypes with different geometries (pads/pixels/strips), thickness (300 and 50μm) and gain (between 5 and 20) have been re...

Is it possible to design a detector able to concurrently measure time and position with high precision? This question is at the root of the research and development of silicon sensors presented in this contribution. Silicon sensors are the most common type of particle detectors used for charged particle tracking, however their rather poor time reso...

In this paper we report on the timing resolution of the first production of 50 micro-meter thick Ultra-Fast Silicon Detectors (UFSD) as obtained in a beam test with pions of 180 GeV/c momentum. UFSD are based on the Low-Gain Avalanche Detectors (LGAD) design, employing n-on-p silicon sensors with internal charge multiplication due to the presence o...

A detailed knowledge of the light ions interaction processes with matter is of great interest in basic and applied physics. As an example, particle therapy and space radioprotection require highly accurate fragmentation cross-section measurements to develop shielding materials and estimate acute and late health risks for manned missions in space an...

A new system (RIDOS, Real-time Ion DOse delivery and planning System) has been developed to evaluate intra-fraction dose distributions during ion beam treatments by means of fast dose computations. A validated forward-planning (FP) for the reconstruction of the physical and biological dose distributions has been parallelized on GPU architecture an...

Purpose: The quality assurance (QA) procedures in particle therapy centers with active beam scanning make extensive use of films, which do not provide immediate results. The purpose of this work is to verify whether the 2D MatriXX detector by IBA Dosimetry has enough sensitivity to replace films in some of the measurements. Methods: MatriXX is a...

Purpose or Objective: A tool for fast dose distributions analysis in hadrontherapy is presented, which integrates on GPU a Fast Forward Planning (F-FP), a Fast Image Registration algorithm (F-IR), a Fast Gamma-Index (F-GI) and Fast DVH computations. The tool will be interfaced with the dose delivery system (DDS) of a synchrotron-based facility to i...

http://www.physicamedica.com/article/S1120-1797(16)00237-4/fulltext https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1120179716002374?via%3Dihub Introduction: The Italian hadrontherapy center (CNAO) uses actively scanned proton and carbon-ion beams to treat tumors and is equipped with a dose delivery system (DDS) to monitor and guide the beams to...

http://www.thegreenjournal.com/article/S0167-8140(16)30189-X/abstract http://www.thegreenjournal.com/article/S0167-8140(16)30189-X/pdf

Nowadays new compact accelerators for charged particles beam therapy have been proposed where high beam intensities occur in short pulses. An innovative multi-gap ionization chamber is proposed which will allow to measure on-line high flux charged particle beams. The device includes three parallel ionization chambers with independent anodes and cat...

Monitoring the prescribed dose in particle therapy is typically carried out by using parallel plate ionization chambers working in transmission mode. The use of gas detectors has several drawbacks: they need to be calibrated daily against standard dosimeters and their dependence on beam quality factors need to be fully characterized and controlled...

The quality assurance (QA) procedure has to check the most relevant beam parameters to ensure the delivery of the correct dose to patients. Film dosimetry, which is commonly used for scanned ion beam QA, does not provide immediate results. The purpose of this work is to answer whether, for scanned ion beam therapy, film dosimetry can be replaced wi...

The reduced concentration of oxygen in cells (hypoxia) results in a lower cell death rate after irradiation that can lead to treatment failure. The effect can be expressed by the oxygen enhancement ratio (OER). So far, only few attempts to include OER in treatment planning for ion beam therapy were made, which are based on the dose averaged LET est...

This paper describes the system for the dose delivery currently used at the Centro Nazionale di Adroterapia Oncologica (CNAO) for ion beam modulated scanning radiotherapy. CNAO Foundation, Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare and University of Torino have designed, built, and commissioned a dose delivery system (DDS) to monitor and guide ion beams...

The relative biological effectiveness (RBE) concept is commonly used in treatment planning for ion beam therapy. Whether models based on in vitro/in vivo RBE data can be used to predict human response to treatments is an open issue. In this work an alternative method, based on an effective radiobiological parameterization directly derived from clin...

Purpose: Modulated scanned beam interplay with the intra-fraction target motion may result in dose deterioration in ion beam therapy. The magnitude of this effect was investigated with a new tool based on forward planning (FP) computation using the data collected at the Italian National Center of Oncological Hadrontherapy (CNAO) for single fields,...

Objective: In pencil beam scanning technique dedicated magnets are used to drive a pencil beam through the target volume. These operations are performed by the dose delivery system which drives the treatment by exploiting the treatment planning data and the online measurements of the delivered number of particles and corresponding positions. The la...

Objective: In pencil beam scanning technique dedicated magnets are used to drive a pencil beam through the target volume. These operations are performed by the dose delivery system which drives the treatment by exploiting the treatment planning data and the online measurements of the delivered number of particles and corresponding positions. The la...

A dedicated Dose Delivery System (DDS) was developed to implement the modulated spot scanning technique at the Italian Hadrontherapy facility (CNAO). This is the highest conformal method in use with protons and carbon ions worldwide. The clinical 3 dimensional target is subdivided into several spots irradiated delivering a pencil beam for each spot...

A new hadron-therapy facility implementing an active beam scanning technique has been developed at the Italian National Center of Oncological Hadron-therapy (CNAO). This paper presents the design and the characterization of the beam monitor detectors developed for the on-line monitoring and control of the dose delivered during a treatment at CNAO....

Purpose: The first Italian hospital-based facility for hadrontherapy is the Centro Nazionale di Adroterapia Oncologica (CNAO) which started the clinical activity on September 2011 with protons beams. The control of the treatment is performed online by the Dose Delivery (DD) system which guides the whole treatment by measuring beam characteristics a...

Introduction: Hadron-therapy is an effective technique used to treat tumors that are located between or nearby vital organs. The Italian National Center of Oncological Hadron-therapy (CNAO) has been realized as the first facility in Italy to treat very difficult tumors with protons and Carbon ions. The on-line monitor system for CNAO has been devel...

Protons and light ions are advantageous because of three physical properties. Firstly, they penetrate the patient practically without diffusion. Secondly, they deposit their maximum energy density abruptly at the end of their range. Thirdly, being charged, they can easily be formed as narrow focused and scanned pencil beams of variable penetration...

The first Italian hospital-based facility for hadron therapy, the Centro Nazionale di Adroterapia Oncologica (CNAO), is treating patients since a few weeks. The optimization and commissioning of the Dose Delivery system have been performed in the course of the current year and were concluded in August 2011. After a short introduction on the CNAO an...

A detector (MOPI) has been developed for the online monitoring of the beam at the Centro di AdroTerapia e Applicazioni Nucleari Avanzate (CATANA), where shallow tumours of the ocular region are treated with 62 MeV protons. At CATANA the beam is passively spread to match the tumour shape. The uniformity of the delivered dose depends on beam geometri...

In hadron therapy one of the most advanced methods for beam delivery is the active scanning technique which uses fast scanning magnets to drive a narrow particle beam across the target. The Centro Nazionale di Adroterapia Oncologica (CNAO) will treat tumours with this technique. The CNAO scanning system includes two identical dipole magnets for hor...

Proton therapy represents the most promising radiotherapy technique for external tumor treatments. At Laboratori Nazionali del Sud of the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN-LNS), Catania, Italy, a proton therapy facility is active since March 2002 and 200 patients, mainly affected by choroidal and iris melanoma, have been successfully trea...

Quasidiscrete scanning is a delivery strategy for proton and ion beam therapy in which the beam is turned off when a slice is finished and a new energy must be set but not during the scanning between consecutive spots. Different scanning paths lead to different dose distributions due to the contribution of the unintended transit dose between spots....

The dissociation of virtual photons, , in events with a large rapidity gap between X and the outgoing proton, as well as in events in which the leading proton was directly measured, has been studied with the ZEUS detector at HERA. The data cover photon virtualities and centre-of-mass energies , with , where is the mass of the hadronic final state,...

Purpose/Objective(s): The beam delivery line of the active scanning irradiation system for heavy?ion radiotherapy requires a series of elements along the beam path before the patient like ripple filters and monitoring system. Usually these elements are optimized only for physical dose profiles. However, it is necessary to consider the biological ef...

Hadrotherapy might be the last chance option for patients with cancers growing deep in the body or surrounded by very sensitive organs. The Italian National Center of Oncological Hadrotherapy (CNAO) in Pavia is a synchrotron based center for the treatment of tumors with protons and carbon ion beams. The result of this sophisticated technique is str...

The therapeutic use of protons and ions, especially carbon ions, is a new technique and a challenge to conform the dose to the target due to the energy deposition characteristics of hadron beams. An appropriate treatment planning system (TPS) is strictly necessary to take full advantage. We developed a TPS software, ANCOD++, for the evaluation of t...

A family of Application Specific Integrated Circuits ( ASICs ) called TERA have been developed for the readout of pixel and strip gas detectors used in radiotherapy applications. The TERA ASICs are based on the charge balancing integration technique in order to obtain a good linearity over a dynamic range of five order of magnitude.

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector is described. The detector operates at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It was conceived to study proton-proton (and lead-lead) collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 14 TeV (5.5 TeV nucleon-nucleon) and at luminosities up to 1034 cm−2 s−1 (1027 cm−2 s−1). At the core of the CMS detector sits a hig...

A 64-channel circuit Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) for charge measurement has been designed in CMOS 0.35 μm technology and characterized with electrical tests.The ASIC has been conceived to be used as a front-end for dosimetry and beam monitoring detector read-out. For that application, the circuitry is housed at a few centimeters...

Purpose: The purpose of this report is to investigate the effects on the Relative Biological Effectiveness (RBE) due to nuclear fragmentation during irradiation with therapeuticcarbonion beams, by using biological model calculations. Method and Materials: In order to disentangle the biological effects of the mixed particle fields, we evaluated the...

Proton and carbon ion beams have a very sharp Bragg peak. For proton beams of energies smaller than 100 MeV, fitting with a gaussian the region of the maximum of the Bragg peak, the sigma along the beam direction is smaller than 1 mm, while for carbon ion beams, the sigma derived with the same technique is smaller than 1 mm for energies up to 360 M...

An integrated 64-channel device for the read-out of parallel plate pixel and strip ionization detectors has been developed by the INFN and University of Torino. The detectors will be used for the monitoring and control of hadrontherapy beams. The ASIC has been designed in CMOS 0.8μm technology and it is based on a current-to-frequency converter fol...

This work summarizes the motivations of different, INFN groups to start a dedicated research project for the development of innovative treatment planning systems for hadrontherapy, with a particular attention to the case where carbon ions are used. Different tasks are identified according to the specific competence developed so far within INFN.