https://doi.org/10.1140/epjp/s13360-025-06039-z
Review
Prospects for applying radioactive ion beams in particle therapy
Institute for Quantum Medical Science, National Institutes for Quantum Science and Technology, 4-9-1 Anagawa, Inage-ku, 263-8555, Chiba, Japan
a
yamaya.taiga@qst.go.jp
b
kang.hangyu@qst.go.jp
Received:
8
March
2024
Accepted:
19
January
2025
Published online:
6
March
2025
Particle beam therapy is becoming increasingly popular as an advanced cancer treatment method, and currently proton and (stable) carbon ion beams are used clinically. Recently, in-beam positron emission tomography (PET) has been investigated for dose monitoring technique during particle therapy. However, the signal-to-noise ratio of in-beam PET images is poor due to the low yield of positron emitters. On the contrary, radioactive ion (RI) beams is ideally suited to particle therapy using in-beam PET due to its high signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, RI beams enable more accurate analysis of the biological washout effect than conventional stable beam irradiations do. These advantages have been clearly demonstrated in many animal studies with prototyped PET systems. On the other hand, there are several issues that limit clinical use of RI beams such as the low RI beam intensity, large momentum distribution, and the limited number of RI beam facilities. This article reviews the state-of-the-art research and development for applications of RI beams to particle beam therapy.
Taiga Yamaya and Han Gyu Kang equally contributed to this work.
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© The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
