Internal medicine

Medical physics

Proton therapy

Radiation therapy

Medicine

Radiotherapy and Oncology

Irradiation with protons has two important advantages over irradiation with photons. Firstly, proton therapy offers the possibility of sparing normal tissue much better than conventional radiotherapy, due to its physical dose profile, while maintaining the same dose in the tumour and secondly, proton irradiation is biologically more effective than photon irradiation [1]. Therefore, dose prescription in clinics uses the relative biological effectiveness (RBE) to convert the absorbed dose to an RBE-weighted dose corresponding to an isoeffective photon dose.

Clinical use and future requirements of relative biological effectiveness: Survey among all European proton therapy centres