In-beam PET monitoring of mono-energetic ¹⁶O and ¹²C beams: experiments and FLUKA simulations for homogeneous targets

¹⁶O and ¹²C ion beams will be used—besides lighter ions—for cancer treatment at the Heidelberg Ion Therapy Center (HIT), Germany. It is planned to monitor the treatment by means of in-beam positron emission tomography (PET) as it is done for therapy with ¹²C beams at the experimental facility at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI), Darmstadt, Germany. To enable PET also for ¹⁶O beams, experimental data of the β⁺-activity created by these beams are needed. Therefore, in-beam PET measurements of the activity created by ¹⁶O beams of various energies on targets of PMMA, water and graphite were performed at GSI for the first time. Additionally reference measurements of ¹²C beams on the same target materials were done. The results of the measurements are presented. The deduction of clinically relevant results from in-beam PET data requires reliable simulations of the β⁺-activity production, which is done presently by a dedicated code limited to ¹²C beams. Because this code is not extendable to other ions in an easy way, a new code, capable of simulating the production of the β⁺-activity by all ions of interest, is needed. Our choice is the general purpose Monte Carlo code FLUKA which was used to simulate the ion transport, the β⁺-active isotope production, the decay, the positron annihilation and the transport of the annihilation photons. The detector response was simulated with an established software that gives the output in the same list-mode data format as in the experiment. This allows us to use the same software to reconstruct measured and simulated data, which makes comparisons easier and more reliable. The calculated activity distribution shows general good agreement with the measurements.