Poros project deal with robotised patient positioning in protontherapy .
This project aims at demonstrating that patient positionners based on industrial robots are likely to be the best suited solution for radiotherapy. As a first step, the study will be carried out in the field of Protontherapy (very precise technique thanks to high precision of proton beams), for which constraints in terms of precision and speed are very high, and industrial innovation active for several years. A routine clinical procedure, developed in collaboration with ARIPA, already works at the CPO (Centre de Protonthérapie d’Orsay), one room based on a serial robot and another on a parallel one. The aim is therefore to develop a new prototype and a demonstration platform in order to obtain an integrated automatic system that provides generic positioning features, in a pre-industrial form. Such a system should increase the accuracy of the positioning, reduce the treatment duration and thus allowing increasing the number of treated patients.
The first step towards this realisation concerns the optimization of the industrial robot (optimisation of the internal model, load compensation, automated calibration) in order to improve its accuracy and repeatability.
Then this project will focus on the enhancement of the robot guidance by multiple means: automated X-ray imaging, optical and surface tracking, trajectory optimisation, compensation of the movements induced by breathing, synchronisation and continuous motion of the positioner with a beam control. The safety of such a system for medical use will be taken into account by hardware and software interlocks, modelling of the trajectory and anti-collision systems... This project will also focus on the industrial potential of this solution (integration of the PPS inside the treatment process, user friendly interface, CE marking process).
This 3 years project will involve a consortium composed of industrial partners : AS2I, ARIPA, FANUC (robot developers) and Dosisoft (developer of softwares for treatment planning dedicated to prothonterapy), two research laboratories (LRP and CEA) and a radiotherapy/protontherapy major treatment centre (Institut Curie/CPO).
Poros
