Flash Radiotherapy could Deliver all the Radiation Needed in One Rapid Treatment

We are a couple of years away from, but keeping an open eye upon it won't do any harm.

"Purpose

Recent studies suggest that ultrahigh-dose-rate, “FLASH,” electron radiation therapy (RT) decreases normal tissue damage while maintaining tumor response compared with conventional dose rate RT. Here, we describe a novel RT apparatus that delivers FLASH proton RT (PRT) using double scattered protons with computed tomography guidance and provide the first report of proton FLASH RT-mediated normal tissue radioprotection.....

Conclusions

We have designed and dosimetrically validated a FLASH-PRT system with accurate control of beam flux on a millisecond time scale and online monitoring of the integral and dose delivery time structure. Using this system, we found that FLASH-PRT decreases acute cell loss and late fibrosis after whole-abdomen and focal intestinal RT, whereas tumor growth inhibition is preserved between the 2 modalities"

redjournal.org/article/S036...

Europe was a tiny bit earlier in publishing.

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/312...

[tallguy2]

Thanks for posting this! Let's keep in mind that proton therapy is not useful in dealing with bone metastasis. So there will be some limitations to this treatment. Nonetheless, very interesting reading.

[Hidden in reply to tallguy2]

The underline info on this, is that aiming of the beam has to be very thightly controlled, or else.

Consequently, irradiation scatter all over known and unknown targets (shooting in the dark of today's SOC) will eventually pass to history like Cobalt Linacs.