Northern Illinois Proton
Treatment and Research Center
WEST CHICAGO, Ill. /PRNewswire/ -- Scientists and researchers from the Northern Illinois Proton Treatment and Research Center (NIPTRC) and Northern Illinois University along with their partners are developing a new imaging process using a proton beam that they believe will be a major medical breakthrough in the delivery of proton beam therapy for cancer patients.
Research Director and Chief Physicist George Coutrakon, Ph.D. says it demonstrates that NIPTRC and NIU are already fulfilling their goal to further cancer treatment for certain head and neck as well as difficult to treat pediatric cancers.
"By using a proton beam scan instead of an x-ray CT scan to image a patient prior to treatment, density maps would be more accurate and the proton beam would stop more precisely on the tumor," said Coutrakon. "This is advantageous for such tumors located at the brain stem and base of the skull because precision is absolutely essential in sparing healthy tissues. This is particularly important for tumors in children."
Currently, x-ray CT scans are used to develop an image of the cancer patient and simulate the radiation dose delivered by the proton beam to the tumor. Although x-ray CT scans have worked well for many years, they do contain an error margin that researchers believe could be reduced substantially through the use of proton beam scanning technology in imaging. The existing procedure of using x-ray CT scans causes the range of a proton beam to have a margin of error of about three percent. By using a proton beam scan instead, the margin of error would be reduced from approximately three percent to less than one percent thereby allowing greater dose sparing of healthy tissue.
The new innovation bears witness to NIPTRC's vital mission of advancement in cancer treatment research that will set it apart from any other proton treatment center. The discovery comes even as the northern Illinois center is still under construction.
"Even though we are not yet operational, there is a great deal of research activity taking place behind the scenes," said Executive Director John Lewis. "Our mission is to advance proton therapy to an even higher level in order to more effectively treat cancer patients around the world. This will continue and we anticipate more announcements like this one in the months and years to come."
Nearly 50 years ago, Nobel Prize winner Dr. Allan Cormack first proposed the idea of using protons for scanning instead of x-rays in a 1963 research paper. Two years ago, NIU and Loma Linda University in California took Cormack's theory and began work to develop proton scan technology for proton treatment imaging. Since then, the two institutes have partnered with Cal State San Bernardino, the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), and even the University of Haifa in Israel. NIU's Physics and Computer Science Departments are making considerable research contributions to the project as well.
