Compagnia di San Paolo - Bando ex-post - Anno 2020 - "Counter Of Particles and Energy..." - Cda 21/12/2021

Among available cancer treatment techniques, particle therapy has great potentials in reducing toxicities and improving quality of life. Beam monitoring, a key step of particles delivery process, is currently based on real-time integration of the ionization charge produced in gas-filled chambers. The limits of this indirect measurement approach (suboptimal response sensitivity, spatial/temporal resolutions) and the lack of a technology to measure the beam particles’ energy during treatment, prevents the clinical implementation of highly-demanding delivery techniques (rescanning modalities or shot-byshot energy modulation to treat moving targets, as examples). To overcome those drawbacks, COPERNICO introduces as radical vision the direct measurements of energy and position of each beam particle delivered to the patient. COPERNICO proposes a double-plane pioneer detector, based on frontier silicon technology integrated with advanced VLSI and data acquisition architecture, radiation hard up to large fluences (per treatment room: 10^15/cm^2 protons, in the energy range 60-250 MeV, per year). The clinical constraints require a large sensitive area (20x20 cm^2), detection efficiency close to 100% on fluxes up to 10^10 particles/s, extremely fine granularity (pixels of 100-200 micrometers), outstanding speed performances (readout of millions of channels every microsecond), and consequent transfer of tens of Gbyte/s. To measure the average particle energy in each shot with 0.5 MeV uncertainty using time-of-flight techniques, tens of picoseconds time resolution is necessary, while tens of micrometers thickness ensure low material budget. Preliminary tests of this revolutionary detection paradigm and multi-disciplinary Consortium guarantee the project’s plausibility. COPERNICO will be the precursor of a new era of therapeutic beam monitors, paving the way to new clinical scenarios in oncology, and beyond (e.g. non-invasive cardiac arrhythmia ablation with ion beams).