KERMA · A NEW VERIFICATION SYSTEM FOR COMPLEX RADIOTHERAPY TREATMENTS

Cancer is the second most frequent cause of death in developed countries. At present, although surgery is the most effective way to remove the malignant tissue, when it is combined with radiation therapy improves the cure rate by 40% approximately. All radiotherapy involves risk because even a small error in treatment planning, delivery, or dosimetry can lead to negative consequences. This is because the human body is a complex organism and tumours are often located in close proximity to sensitive normal tissues and critical organs. Therefore, proper dosimetry verification and treatment planning systems are crucial to ensure safety and quality in the radiotherapy treatments.Our KERMA project is a new dose verification system for radiotherapy treatments, based on a disruptive technology with the aim to obtain three-dimensional dose maps, reducing errors in patient’s treatments, helping decision-making of physicians and thus, performing the verification of treatment more safely and quickly. A first prototype has been developed based on a novel dual single sided silicon strip detector chip capable of measuring the doses in axial plane with high spatial resolution and in real time. For this prototype a new software instrument has been established which not only manages the data acquisition and storage but also automates the entire process. This new technology allows integrating in the same environment all tasks involved in a radiotherapy treatment, providing a double check in the verification plan, reducing errors and avoiding the idle time between each step of the process, while improving the performance of every task.