Verificación del rango de los protones en el ámbito de la protonterapia y la física nuclear

Abstract

La protonterapia es una técnica de radioterapia que usa protones como partícula ionizante para irradiar tumores [Paganetti, 2011]. La principal ventaja de esta técnica con respecto a la radioterapia tradicional viene dada por la forma en que los protones depositan energía, caracterizada por concentrar la mayor parte de la dosis en la zona más distal del rango del protón, generando un pico de dosis conocido como pico de Bragg[Paganetti, 2011; Knoll, 2010]...

In this chapter, we will introduce all the necessary physics for understanding protontherapy and range verification. Apart from this, certain concepts that will be used throughout the thesis will be detailed. One of them is the detection of ionizing radiationthat will be used to measure cross sections in Chapter 3. We will also introduce Monte Carlo simulators for particle transport since they will be used throughout the thesis. Finally, we will briefly introduce what GPUs (Graphics Processing Units) are and how they can be used to considerably accelerate almost any code. In this thesis, both the proposed reconstructor in Chapter 4 and the MC simulator in Chapter 6 are fully implemented on a GPU...