A simulation study of a dual-plate in-room PET system for dose verification in carbon ion therapy

Abstract: Carbon ion therapy have the ability to overcome the limitation of convertional radiotherapy due to its most energy deposition in selective depth, usually called Bragg peak, which results in increased biological effectiness. During carbon ion therapy, lots positron emitters such as $^{11}$C, $^{15}$O, $^{10}$C are generated in irradiated tissues by nuclear reactions. Immediately after patient irradiation, PET scanners can be used to measure the spatial distribution of positron emitters, which can track the carbon beam to the tissue. In this study, we designed and evaluated an dual-plate in-room PET scanner to monitor patient dose in carbon ion therapy, which is based on GATE simulation platform. A dual-plate PET is designed to avoid interference with the carbon beam line and with patient positioning. Its performance was compared with that of four-head and full-ring PET scanners. The dual-plate, four-head and full-ring PET scanners consisted of 30, 60, 60 detector modules, respectively, with a 36 cm distance between directly opposite detector modules for dose deposition measurements. Each detector module was consisted of a 24$\times$24 array of 2$\times2\times$18 mm$^{3}$ LYSO pixels coupled to a Hamamatsu H8500 PMT. To esitmate the production yield of positron emitters, a 10$\times15\times$15 cm$^{3}$ cuboid PMMA phantom was irradiated with 172, 200, 250 AMeV $^{12}$C beams. 3D images of the activity distribution of the three type scanners are produced by an iterative reconstruction algorithm. By comparing the longitudinal profile of positron emitters, measured along the carbon beam path, we concluded that the development of a dual-plate PET scanner is feasible to monitor the dose distribution for carbon ion therapy.