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MOFFIITS – Misure di frammentazione dell’ossigeno per il miglioramento delle terapie ioniche
- Scientific PI: Mauro Villa
- On going (Start date 23/11/2023 – End date 22/11/2025)
Cancer is the second cause of death in Europe (Eurostat report 2023) and one of the expanding and effective cures for solid tumors is ion therapy. The Treatment Planning Systems (TPS) that are currently used contain accurate knowledge of the interaction of the ion with the human body, but for what regards the microscopic level there is a consistent lack of data, especially on nuclear interactions and nuclear fragmentation. This forces the TPS to stay on the safe side and deliver the “safe” amount of dose, considering the known uncertainties.
The MOFFIITS project (Measuring Oxygen Fragmentation For Improved Ion Therapy Strategies) aims to measure the double differential cross sections for Oxygen on a Carbon and a Polyethylene targets as a function of the produced fragment charge, mass, production angle and kinetic energy with a 5% accuracy. With these measurements, performed in an energy range compatible with the one from ion therapy, it will be possible to elucidate part of the nuclear processes happening during proton and carbon ion treatments. This will allow to increase the accuracy of the TPS, increasing (in the long run) the number of patients treated each year on the same machine.
The project starts from the tools, knowledge, and detectors available to the FOOT collaboration, that has developed in recent years two set-ups devoted to the measurement of the fragmentation processes. We will use the GSI infrastructure for the availability of a well tunable Oxygen-16 beam.
