Design and characterization of the beam monitor detectors of the Italian National Center of Oncological Hadron-therapy (CNAO)

A new hadron-therapy facility implementing an active beam scanning technique has been developed at the Italian National Center of Oncological Hadron-therapy (CNAO). This paper presents the design and the characterization of the beam monitor detectors developed for the on-line monitoring and control of the dose delivered during a treatment at CNAO. The detectors are based on five parallel-plate transmission ionization chambers with either a single large electrode or electrodes segmented in 128 strips (strip chambers) and 32×32 pixels (pixel chamber). The detectors are arranged in two independent boxes with an active area larger than 200×200 mm2 and a total water equivalent thickness along the beam path of about 0.9 mm. A custom front-end chip with 64 channels converts the integrated ionization channels without dead-time. The detectors were tested at the clinical proton beam facility of the Paul Scherrer Institut (PSI) which implements a spot scanning technique, each spot being characterized by a predefined number of protons delivered with a pencil beam in a specified point of the irradiation field. The short-term instability was measured by delivering several identical spots in a time interval of few tenths of seconds and is found to be lower than 0.3%. The non-uniformity, measured by delivering sequences of spots in different points of the detector surface, results to be lower than 1% in the single electrode chambers and lower than 1.5% in the strip and pixel chambers, reducing to less than 0.5% and 1% in the restricted 100×100 mm2 central area of the detector.