CERN Accelerating science

Luca Bottura, who leads CERN’s Magnets, Superconductors and Cryostats group, will illustrate his innovative design for a hadron therapy gantry based upon a toroidal magnet.

Gantry systems represent a major technical challenge for treating tumours with protons and other ions: gantries are essential to steer the beam around the patient in order to irradiate the tumour from different angles, thus allowing treatment modalities closer to the most advanced conventional radiotherapy techniques.

The cost and complexity of the infrastructures required for hadron therapy is a limiting factor for its exploitation. In proton therapy, gantries are nowadays almost a standard feature, but are still massive and complicated pieces of engineering, and they represent a sizeable fraction of the total cost of the installation. As the therapeutic interest for ions heavier than protons is on the rise, the gigantic size of the few ion gantries already constructed, and the lack of a viable standard solution, are posing important constraints on future hadron therapy facilities.

The GaToroid design offers the advantages of eliminating the need to mechanically rotate the structure and of making the overall system extremely compact and lightweight. The possibility to use high-temperature superconductors makes GaToroid even more intriguing, as this choice would most likely further reduce the dimensions of the gantry.

https://kt.cern/technologies/gatoroid