Introduction Today, there is a growing interest in the use of hadrontherapy as an advanced radiotherapy technique. Hadrontherapy is considered a promising tool for cancer treatment, given its high radiobiological effectiveness and high accuracy of dose deposition due to the physical properties of hadrons. However, new radiation modalities of dose delivery and on-line beam monitoring play crucia...

The sequence of incremental dose delivery during a radiotherapy fraction can potentially influence the radiobiological effect. This would be most noticeable during the long fractions characteristic of hypo-fractionated stereotactic radiotherapy and radiosurgery. We demonstrate here the spatio-temporal variation of dose delivery by the CyberKnife to a lung tumor and propose strategies to reduce ...

Biological effects of proton and light ion irradiations have been studied in detail by analyzing published cell survival data with the help of the probabilistic two-stage radiobiological model. Probabilities of single ion tracks to induce lesions of different severity have been assessed in dependence on their linear energy transfer (LET). The results are presented and their interpretation in te...

The increasing utilization of charged particle beams for therapeutic purposes requires designing novel detector systems which shall be capable of assessing radiation quality for a diversity of ion species. It is shown that the pattern of energy deposition in thermoluminescent phosphors and biological tissue contains conceptual parallels. The correlation of physical and radiobiological parameter...

Selecting optimal doses for radiosurgery requires a thorough consideration of existing dose-response data for radiation injury of brain and surrounding structures and of the doseresponse for the desired endpoint (tumor control, obliteration of a vascular malformation, relief of trigeminal neuralgia, etc.). This paper reviews the radiobiological and physics principles that should be considered i...