|
Radiation therapy of tumors progresses continuously and so do devices, sharing a global market of about $ 4 billions,
growing at an annual rate exceeding 5%. Most of the progress involves tumor targeting, multi-beam irradiation, reduction
of damage on healthy tissues and critical organs, dose fractioning. This fast-evolving scenario is the moving benchmark
for the progress of the laser-based accelerators towards clinical uses. As for electrons, both energy and dose requested by
radiotherapy are available with plasma accelerators driven by lasers in the power range of tens of TW but several issues
have still to be faced before getting a prototype device for clinical tests. They include capability of varying electron
energy, stability of the process, reliability for medical users. On the other side hadron therapy, presently applied to a
small fraction of cases but within an exponential growth, is a primary option for the future. With such a strong
motivation, research on laser-based proton/ion acceleration has been supported in the last decade in order to get
performances suitable to clinical standards. None of these performances has been achieved so far with laser techniques.
In the meantime a rich crop of data have been obtained in radiobiological experiments performed with beams of particles
produced with laser techniques. It is quite significant however that most of the experiments have been performed moving
bio samples to laser labs, rather moving laser equipment to bio labs or clinical contexts. This give us the measure that
laser community cannot so far provide practical devices usable by non-laser people.
|
