Hospitals Look to a Nuclear Tool to Fight Cancer

The feed points us to a NYTimes article about hospitals using particle accelerators to treat cancer. While expensive, proponents say that the proton beams generated by the accelerators are more precise than conventional X-ray radiation therapy. This results in fewer side effects and reduced irradiation of surrounding tissue. The technology's critics say that the cost is not justified by a measurable increase in the level of care given to the patients. Nevertheless, this is an excellent example of "pure scientific research" leading to a useful, unrelated technique. From the NYTimes: "Tumors in or near the eye, for instance, can be eradicated by protons without destroying vision or irradiating the brain. Protons are also valuable for treating tumors in brains, necks and spines, and tumors in children, who are especially sensitive to the side effects of radiation."

Comments

Re:Side Effects?

[johnny maxwell]

Since they are accelerated, I'm guessing they penetrate further, but they will be stopped quicker too (charge, mass, volume, all these will make them easier to stop than high energy photon radiation). Best of all, it's the stopping/slowing of the protons that kills the cells (they hit stuff, break stuff, and stop/slow down), so less energy will be needed since the majority of the high-energy photons would just pass through. The trickiest part would be to determine how many protons and with how much energy.

For a nice picture of energy deposition vs. depth see e.g. http://www.gsi.de/forschung/bio/energy_e.html
One can adjust the peak energy deposition's depth by varying the proton's energy. The surrounding tissue gets a much lower dose than in X-Ray irradiations.
Combine the particle accelerator with a PET (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positron_emission_tomography) and you can irradiate a cancer with cubic millimeter resolution.

This is actually not a new, purely academic technique, it is already commercially available, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton_therapy

Attention: I'm not a doctor but a physics student :)