About 50% of all cancer patients are subjected to radiation therapy that may be further improved by broader use of proton treatment and better monitoring of the result of each therapeutic radiation session. The in-vivo image-guidance and dosimetry of proton irradiations, generically known as proton range verification, are some of the most underinvested aspects of radiation oncology. They trail behind other advances in radiation therapy due to the scarcity of sensitive instruments compounded by the lack of treatment protocols for precision monitoring of effects of beam radiation. This is despite that such measurements may dramatically enhance the treatment accuracy and lower the post-radiation toxicity, thus improving the entire outcome of cancer therapy. We will discuss the motivation of designing and building a positron-emission-tomography (PET) scanner for assisting in proton irradiations. It is critical that proton therapy becomes more accessible and of better quality as an essential component of “precision personal medicine” that is currently beginning to shape modern medicine. We also present selected results of our pre-clinical experiments with a FLASH proton beam and discuss other related ideas towards improving and expanding the use of PET detectors for proton therapy.

Mini-biosketch:

Karol Lang is the Jane and Roland Blumberg Professor of Physics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches and conducts research in experimental particle physics and in nuclear medical imaging. He received his M.Sc. in Physics from the University of Warsaw, and his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester.

Karol Lang has participated in experiments conducted at accelerators at Fermilab, SLAC, BNL, and CERN, and underground laboratories in Soudan, Modane and Gran Sasso. Currently, he is involved in the Fermilab program to study long baseline neutrino oscillations and in experiments designed to search for neutrinoless double beta decay. As a spinoff of these experimental programs, he is also involved in research to develop and employ high sensitivity positron emission tomography (PET) scanners for the in-beam image-guided proton therapy, elucidation of the FLASH effect, and the total body imaging.