Quality assurance for proton therapy
The NHS had the world’s first hospital-based proton beam centre in 1989 at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre. It is a low energy facility and is used for treating cancer of the eye. Now the government has invested in two high energy facilities, in Manchester and London, and there are a small number of private facilities that have opened since 2018. This rapid increase in the capacity for proton beam therapy is mirrored worldwide with the numbers of centres at approximately 85, around half of which opened in the last 10 years.
With the growing community of physicists involved in the quality assurance (QA) of these facilities, the American Association of Physicists in Medicine has recently published guidelines1 on the subject in a similar fashion to those for photon QA. Naturally the philosophy is similar, with the approach based on failure mode analysis of the system. The treatment delivery system, however, is very different.
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