Preliminary results in using Deep Learning to emulate BLOB, a nuclear interaction model.

Purpose: A reliable model to simulate nuclear interactions is fundamental for Ion-therapy. We already showed how BLOB ("Boltzmann-Langevin One Body"), a model developed to simulate heavy ion interactions up to few hundreds of MeV/u, could simulate also C reactions in the same energy domain. However, its computation time is too long for any medical application.

Preliminary results coupling "Stochastic Mean Field" and "Boltzmann-Langevin One Body" models with Geant4.

Purpose: Monte Carlo (MC) simulations are widely used for medical applications and nuclear reaction models are fundamental for the simulation of the particle interactions with patients in ion therapy. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to have reliable models in MC simulations for such interactions. Geant4 is one of the most used toolkits for MC simulation.

The β radio-guided surgery: Method to estimate the minimum injectable activity from ex-vivo test.

Purpose: Radio-guided surgery with β decays is a novel technique under investigation. One of the main advantages is its capability to detect small (⩽0.1 ml) samples after injecting the patient with low activity of radiopharmaceutical.

Feasibility of beta-particle radioguided surgery for a variety of "nuclear medicine" radionuclides.

Purpose: Beta-particle radioguided tumor resection may potentially overcome the limitations of conventional gamma-ray guided surgery by eliminating, or at least minimizing, the confounding effect of counts contributed by activity in adjacent normal tissues. The current study evaluates the clinical feasibility of this approach for a variety of radionuclides. Nowadays, the only β radioisotope suited to radioguided surgery is Y.

First ex vivo validation of a radioguided surgery technique with β-radiation.

Purpose: A radio-guided surgery technique with β(-)-emitting radio-tracers was suggested to overcome the effect of the large penetration of γ radiation. The feasibility studies in the case of brain tumors and abdominal neuro-endocrine tumors were based on simulations starting from PET images with several underlying assumptions. This paper reports, as proof-of-principle of this technique, an ex vivo test on a meningioma patient.

A novel radioguided surgery technique exploiting β(-) decays.

The background induced by the high penetration power of the radiation is the main limiting factor of the current radio-guided surgery (RGS). To partially mitigate it, a RGS with β(+)-emitting radio-tracers has been suggested in literature. Here we propose the use of β(-)-emitting radio-tracers and β(-) probes and discuss the advantage of this method with respect to the previously explored ones: the electron low penetration power allows for simple and versatile probes and could extend RGS to tumours for which background originating from nearby healthy tissue makes probes less effective.