Nuclear Emulsion Film Detectors for Proton Radiography: Design and Test of the First Prototype

Proton therapy is nowadays becoming a wide spread clinical practice in cancer therapy and sophisticated treatment planning systems are routinely used to exploit at best the ballistic properties of charged particles. The information on the quality of the beams and the range of the protons is a key issue for the optimization of the treatment. For this purpose, proton radiography can be used in proton therapy to obtain direct information on the range of the protons, on the average density of the tissues for treatment planning optimization and to perform imaging with negligible dose to the patient. We propose an innovative method based on nuclear emulsion film detectors for proton radiography, a technique in which images are obtained by measuring the position and the residual range of protons passing through the patient's body. Nuclear emulsion films interleaved with tissue equivalent absorbers can be fruitfully used to reconstruct proton tracks with very high precision. The first prototype of a nuclear emulsion based detector has been conceived, constructed and tested with a therapeutic proton beam at PSI. The scanning of the emulsions has been performed at LHEP in Bern, where a fully automated microscopic scanning technology has been developed for the OPERA experiment on neutrino oscillations. After track reconstruction, the first promising experimental results have been obtained by imaging a simple phantom made of PMMA with a step of 1 cm. A second phantom with five 5 x 5 mm^2 section aluminum rods located at different distances and embedded in a PMMA structure has been also imaged. Further investigations are in progress to improve the resolution and to image more sophisticated phantoms.