The University of California at Santa Cruz is building a prototype of the hardware detector needed to collect the data from the proton beam. This effort is being lead under the direction of Hartmut Sadrozinski of UCSC and Victor Rykalin from NIU. This prototype will be ready by the end of this month and used at Loma Linda to collect the first ever 3-D images of humanlike phantoms. Researchers will work three to four hours a night during three or four days each week on the project, and they will use the same proton beam that treats patients during the daytime. By September, data collection will be complete and ready to feed into computers to process.

The software and computer technology required to process the data presents unique challenges. Currently, it would take hundreds of hours to construct the 360 degree, 3-D images associated with proton scans using conventional computers. This needs to be shortened dramatically to under ten minutes. In order to develop the software needed to make this technical leap forward, a partnership has been formed that includes Drs. Nicholas Karonis and Kirk Duffin from NIU's Computer Science Department, Dr. Bela Erdelyi from NIU's Physics Department, Dr. Keith Schubert from Cal State San Bernardino's Computer Science Department, and Dr. Yair Censor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Haifa in Israel.


"We are willing to partner with everyone that wants to advance the field of proton therapy, whether they are researchers, physicists, engineers, or doctors," said Lewis. "We believe establishing these types of collaborative efforts are the key to innovation and progress."

In fact, NIU is currently in discussions with longtime partner Argonne National Laboratory's Computer Science Division to use their cluster of 24 Graphical Processor Units (GPUs) to attain fast image reconstruction. GPUs are popularly associated with today's impressive video gaming technology, but their remarkable power is now needed to help in the fight against cancer.

"We are very grateful to all our partners and the spirit of cooperation everyone has showed to make this project possible," said Coutrakon. "I am excited to be involved and look forward to sharing the final results once we are complete."

While Coutrakon heads up this research project with west coast universities, radiation physicist Wayne Newhauser, Ph.D. is performing additional research at the University of Texas' MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Since the beginning of NIPTRC's 2008 partnership with UT, Newhauser and his colleagues have published 16 peer-reviewed papers about proton therapy that result from support provided by NIPTRC in collaboration with NIPTRC's clinical partner Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation's Department of Radiation Oncology. These have appeared in scientific, engineering, and medical journals. A complete listing is available on NIPTRC's website at www.niptrc.org.

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