Next month’s Medical Accelerator conference sees the people behind some of the most complex machines in a hospital meet up to discuss the present and future of this cutting-edge cancer treatment.
What have the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and a radiotherapy machine got in common? They are both particle accelerators. While the LHC looks for the secrets of the universe, matter and reality, a radiotherapy machine, actually called a ‘linac’ (Linear Accelerator), is used to treat cancer in patients. It does this by aiming X-rays or a beam of particles such as protons or electrons at a cancerous tumour growing within the body.
Normally, when we think of cancer, we think of patients and the medical profession. It’s easy to forget there are physicists who apply complex theory to medicine. After that, it’s possible for the eye-catching technology to obscure the engineers who put theory into practice and build the linacs.
To make such medical engineers even more elusive, it is not often they meet and discuss their work at a conference. When linac conferences do happen, the discussions often revolve around the end use: doctors treating cancer patients in hospitals.
In July, a truly rare event takes place at the Royal Marsden Institute of Cancer Research at Sutton in Surrey.
The gathering will discuss everything medical accelerator, this time it will be engineers discussing linac engineering with engineers. For a flavour of this, and a message from keynote speaker Kevin J. Brown, MBE CPhys, FInstP, check out the EngX page, https://engx.theiet.org/technical-networks/partacc.
It will take in everything from designing a linac and the way it accelerates particles, to how it is eventually used in the field. The big emphasis will be on radiotherapy, the way a beam of radiation is targeted at a tumour to degrade it in the body, without damaging the surrounding tissue.
Other matters will take in how it is designed and built, and with what materials.
As complex as all this sounds, it only becomes more complicated from here on.
Medical accelerators are far smaller than their more famous cousins at places like CERN in Switzerland, but there are more of them, and they are used more intensively. Despite their lack of size they are still expensive, powerful machines that can use megawatts of power to target a particle beam at a tumour for a microsecond. That falls to a kilowatt over the space of a second.
There are other things to think of too, such as control, systems, manufacturing and the actual engineering. Then there is reliability, because when a machine is out of action, it affects real people with real cancers. All of this is before we get to thinking about cost. As expensive as they are, part of the challenge in building this technology is making it affordable to put it into as many hospitals as possible.
The conference is a half day event and focusing on the technology currently in use. Later, thoughts will turn to discussing the future of particle accelerators in medicine before rounding off with a tour of the Royal Marsden’s radiotherapy department.
All-in-all, this looks to be an event as important as it is fascinating. Why not sign up for tickets and get up to date with what’s going on in this cutting-edge field? And there’s the tour of the Royal Marsden’s Radiotherapy Department as an extra inducement!
-----------------------------------
12th July 2023 / 11:30am - 6:00pm
Royal Marsden Institute of Cancer Research, Sutton, United Kingdom
Please join us as we take a very uniquely engineering focused view of the medical application of accelerators for a half a day event hosted in, Sutton.
You can sign up here…