Development of a plastic scintillator-based detector for proton beam quality assurance.

Proton beam therapy provides significant clinical benefits over conventional X-ray radiotherapy. To ensure a safe treatment daily beam Quality Assurance (QA) checks are carried out each day before the treatment begins for the monitoring of beam parameters. Today, daily beam QA checks are time-consuming operations. Different measures are currently performed using different devices, with an average time spent for beam QA of about 40 minutes. To combine several QA checks and speed up the overall QA time, an integrated device is highly desirable. This work presents the design of a novel integrated detector able to measure simultaneously the beam range, spot position and size in one single beam delivery. The detector combines two independent modules, that is a range calorimeter and a scintillating fibres-based beam monitor. The new system allows for a direct measurement of the beam range and profile. To simulate the detector response a simulation in clinical conditions has been done using the Geant4 toolkit. Results from the simulation will be presented, together with the design and test of a first prototype for the novel detector.