Abstract: A successful proton therapy strongly depends on accurate comprehension of 3D dose distribution and range verification of therapeutic beam while protons penetrate inside patient body to reach tumor volume, according to Bragg peak. One of the proposed strategy to estimate the Bragg peak position is using online monitoring system by means of Positron Emission Tomography (PET). PET monitoring strategy is based on the detection of 0.511 MeV photons, resulting from the annihilation phenomena of positrons emitted by radioactive positron emitters, such as C-11, O-15. Theses latter isotopes are generated by colliding incident protons with nuclei of tissues via non-elastic nuclear reaction. Produced positrons move through the matter and deposit their energy via coulomb scattering and then annihilation is happened at rest. The produced positron emitters are the base of imaging process from protons tracing and Bragg curve information extraction. It should be noted that, the spatial relation between dose distribution of protons and produced positron emitters is complex. The main aim of this contribution is to investigate nuclear interactions and to find any possible correlation among proton dose distribution and produced isotopes and coordinate of annihilation phenomena by means of Monte Carlo FLUKA simulation code. Final analysed results represent that there an agreement between the location of protons Bragg peak and the position of produced positron emitters. Moreover, the coordinate of annihilation phenomena and the position of Bragg peak are related with each other.

Keywords: Proton therapy, dose distribution, Positron, radoactive positron emitter, annihilation phenomena

Biography: My name is Ahmad Esmaili Torshabi; PhD of Proton Therapy physics from Tohoku University Japan, as Assistant Professor with more than ten years teaching graduate and undergraduate students courses and supervising more than 25 MSc theses at Graduate University of Advanced Technology, Kerman, Iran. The main topics that I supervised are as: developing learning based models, real time tumor motion error compensations strategies, developing various prediction models, tumor motion data optimizing, internal-external markers effect at SBRT, 4D simulation of motion effect on 3D prescribed dose, patient setup and positioning issues, medical image processing and registration applicable at RT, ion species characteristics at hadron therapy, micro-dosimetry simulation of semiconductor detector and nano-particle based scintillation detectors. I have close collaboration with Radiology division at Kerman University of medical sciences and Department of Physics at Bahonar University of Kerman as adjunct lecturer and researcher. By getting Marie Curie Fellow at 2009, I was postgraduate researcher at Particle Training Network for European Radiotherapy PARTNER Project in Clinical Bioengineering Unit of National Center for Oncological Hardon therapy at Italy. My research interests have multidisciplinary property and include investigating new cutting edge challenges at image guided personalized radiotherapy as: patient-specific treatment strategies at proton therapy, medical image registration and processing for tumor border delineation and tumor motion error compensation strategies.