February 20, 2023 IRVINE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Lumitron Technologies, Inc., a company pioneering the development of a unique x-ray system, HyperVIEW™ EBCS, today announced its underlying accelerator technology has successfully generated electron beams that, for the first time, enable electron FLASH radiotherapy for a variety of next generation cancer treatments.

“Our accelerator has produced a train of 100 consecutive, high-charge and perfectly timed micro-bunches of electrons at 99.982% of the speed of light or an energy equivalent of 25 MeV, in ten billionths of a second. This ultrashort duration and high energy has the potential to dramatically reduce the side effects of conventional radiotherapy,” said Lumitron CTO and co-founder, Dr. Chris Barty.

According to Dr. Charles Limoli, professor radiation oncology at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) School of Medicine and a FLASH radiotherapy expert, “Dr. Barty has advanced electron beam technology to the stage that it can provide clinically relevant doses of Very High Energy Electrons (VHEE) exceeding the requirements of electron FLASH radiotherapy – in an instrument that can fit inside a standard clinical bunker. This remarkable achievement places Lumitron’s technology years ahead of other groups developing high-energy electron irradiators that are more costly and at least five times larger.”
The accelerator that produced these electron beams is part of Lumitron Technologies’ compact HyperVIEW™ EBCS (Extremely Bright Compton Source) x-ray technology. HyperVIEW™ is the most significant change in clinical and industrial x-ray imaging in over 125 years and will enable revolutionary new capabilities for medical imaging, therapy, materials detection, and other applications across multiple industries. Comparable in size to an MRI or CT instrument, HyperVIEW™ EBCS is designed to collide a beam of near-light-speed electrons with a laser beam to produce high-energy x-ray beams. These beams will enable medical imaging at resolutions 1,000 times higher and/or doses 100 times lower than conventional x-rays, with dramatically shorter imaging times than conventional MRI of soft tissues.

This will enable the first application of Phase Contrast Imaging outside of billion-dollar, large-scale synchrotron facilities and will allow practitioners to image down to a cellular level at the point of care, in a hospital or clinic. Advanced 3D manufacturing will benefit dramatically from Lumitron Technologies' ability to image dense objects such as medical implants and aircraft turbine components with unprecedented accuracy and speed.

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