FOOT

The main goal of the FOOT (FragmentatiOn Of Target) experiment is the measurement of target and projectile fragmentation cross sections relevant for particle therapy. These data are essential in order to provide an accurate description of nuclear interactions taking place between the beam and the patient tissues during the particle treatment, to improve the accuracy of the treatment plan. Indeed given the nuclear reaction cross sections, it is possible to calculate the elemental fragment distributions. Nowadays there is a lack of experimental measurements of the nuclear reaction cross sections for the fragments produced by protons with energies between 60 MeV and 250 MeV, which are the typical energies adopted in proton hadrontherapy. Whereas the available data for the projectile fragmentation in the heavy ion treatment framework are derived only by the GANIL experiment (France), with measurements of carbon ion at 95 MeV/u and 50 MeV/u impinging on C/C2H4 target. There is no available measurements regarding carbon and oxygen ion at 300-350 MeV/u. The FOOT experiment aim is to fill the gap of nuclear elemental cross section in order to improve the algorithms currently used in the Treatment Planning System (TPS). In this way it is possible to explicitly take into account the biological effects due to target and projectile fragmentations, allowing the application of variable proton RBE models with the data related to the target fragmentation. The FOOT experiment results can lead to more accurate TPS, with the reduction of the dose deposition in healthy tissues and the decrease of post treatment side effects.

The FOOT material (theses, publications, links, info) can be found in the web site that is hosted under the INFN joomla platform here.

A twiki page is available with some info about the FOOT software projects.

A thesis on the subject can be found here.

Who:

M. Marafini, V. Patera, A. Sarti, A. Sciubba, G. Traini

Collaborators:

• FOOT collaboration (members from Germany, Italy, China)