Experimental validation of the filtering approach for dose monitoring in proton therapy at low energy

The higher physical selectivity of proton therapy demands higher accuracy in monitoring of the delivered dose, especially when the target volume is located next to critical organs and a fractionated therapy is applied. A method to verify a treatment plan and to ensure the high quality of the hadrontherapy is to use Positron Emission Tomography (PET), which takes advantage of the nuclear reactions between protons and nuclei in the tissue during irradiation producing β+-emitting isotopes. Unfortunately, the PET image is not directly proportional to the delivered radiation dose distribution; this is the reason why, at the present time, the verification of depth dose profiles with PET techniques is limited to a comparison between the measured activity and the one predicted for the planned treatment by a Monte Carlo model. In this paper we test the feasibility of a different scheme, which permits to reconstruct the expected PET signal from the planned radiation dose distribution along beam direction in a simpler and more direct way. The considered filter model, based on the description of the PET image as a convolution of the dose distribution with a filter function, has already demonstrated its potential applicability to beam energies above 70 MeV. Our experimental investigation provides support to the possibility of extending the same approach to the lower energy range ([40, 70] MeV), in the perspective of its clinical application in eye proton therapy.