Graduate School of Medicine, Division of Health Science
[ Self-Introduction ] Undergraduate/Master’s: Rikkyo University, Faculty of Science, Department of Physics
Hobbies: Airsoft, music, sports, martial arts, sauna, and more
I moved to Osaka this spring. If you're interested in airsoft, feel free to contact me! I'm usually in the lab.
[ Research Introduction ]
At the Medical Physics Laboratory of our university, we are leading global research to overcome the challenge of "not being able to see where proton beams are actually irradiated in tumors" in proton therapy. Our work focuses on visualizing the proton irradiation region and dose distribution within the patient’s body.
One of the promising developments in recent years is ultra-high dose-rate proton therapy, known as Flash proton therapy. Unlike traditional methods that deliver radiation over minutes, Flash therapy delivers a large dose of around 10 Gy in less than a second. In treatment using the information from proton irradiation regions and dose distributions generated by Flash proton therapy, visualization within the same second-order timeframe as the irradiation itself is required.
However, current technology is not yet sufficient to accurately calculate the proton range and dose from measurement data of short-lived positron-emitting isotopes generated by elements in the human body with a half-life of less than one second. Thus, our research aims to establish methods to accurately derive proton irradiation regions and dose distribution from the activity distribution of these short-lived positron-emitting isotopes, achieving the level of dose estimation accuracy required for treatment. This is the goal of our ongoing research into proton beam visualization.