Some factors influencing the cost of a hospital based proton therapy centre.

The nowadays availability of state-of-the-art proton therapy equipment from commercial companies, on a contract basis, makes it easier to precisely account for equipment prices as well as to better evaluate the consequences of the equipment characteristics on operating costs and possible patient throughput. This paper presents some data which can be used for the evaluation of these items.

The proton therapy system for MGH's NPTC: equipment description and progress report.

At the beginning of 1994, the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) of the Harvard Medical School in Boston (MA, USA) a pioneer in proton therapy since 1959, selected a team led by Ion Beam Applications SA (IBA) to supply the proton therapy equipment of its new Northeast Proton Therapy Centre (NPTC). The IBA integrated system includes a compact 235 MeV isochronous cyclotron, a short energy selection system transforming the fixed energy beam extracted from the cyclotron into a variable energy beam, one or more isocentric gantries fitted with a nozzle, a system consisting of one or more horizontal beam lines, a global control system including an accelerator control unit and several independent but networked therapy control stations, a global safety management system, and a robotic patient positioning system. The present paper presents the equipment being built for the NPTC.