17th Seminar of HITRIplus – Integration of MRI and proton therapy

Registration is now open for the 17th Seminar of HITRIplus project – “Integration of MRI and proton therapy: motivation, challenges and roadmap” -, scheduled for April 18 (from 17:00 to 18:00). The seminar will be given by Aswin Hoffmann.

The goal of Heavy Ion Therapy Research Integration plus (HITRIplus) is to integrate and propel biophysics and medical research on cancer treatment with heavy ions beams while jointly developing its sophisticated instruments.

About HITRIplus project

Cancer is a central health problem for our society. Heavy ion beams irradiate tumours by focussing on the ill tissue while sparing the healthy part around, more effectively than any other irradiation treatment. The wider objective of HITRIplus is to provide radiation oncologists with a cutting-edge tool to treat the fraction of tumours that are not curable with X-rays or protons or have better survival rates or lower recurrences with ions.
For this major initiative, HITRIplus has gathered a consortium engaging all relevant stakeholders and for the first time bringing together all four European ion therapy centres with leading EU industries, academia, and research laboratories.

The event

Image guidance plays a pivotal role in modern radiation therapy to achieve high local control rates and keep side effects within tolerable levels.

The seminar will provide an overview of recent developments and milestones achieved by various groups on the aforementioned topic. A roadmap for the clinical introduction of in-beam MR-integrated PT is presented, showing ongoing research efforts to address the knowledge gaps and remaining challenges to be solved before a first patient can be safely treated with PT inside an in-beam MRI device. These include artefact-free imaging during irradiation, workflow development, and comparative treatment planning studies demonstrating the expected clinical benefit of real-time in-beam MR-integrated PT over CBCT-guided PT, offline MR-guided PT and MR-LINAC treatments for relevant indications in the thorax, abdomen and pelvis.

To join the event: https://indico.cern.ch/event/1397922/

Aswin Hoffmann obtained his MSc degree in Electrical Engineering from the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands (NL) in 1996. In 2002, he joined the Department of Radiation Oncology of the Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen, where he became a Certified Medical Physics Expert and staff member in 2007. His research interests included brachytherapy, MR imaging and mathematical optimization of radiation therapy planning. On the latter subject, he obtained his PhD degree from the Radboud University in 2013. In 2011, he moved to the MAASTRO clinic in Maastricht (NL), where he was appointed Principal Medical Physics Expert for brachytherapy and worked on the development of MRI-guided radiotherapy. In 2015, he moved to Dresden (Germany), where he became head of the Experimental MR-integrated Proton Therapy group at OncoRay – National Center for Radiation Research in Oncology. Since then, he has been working on the development of prototype systems for MR-integrated proton therapy. In 2021, he was appointed adjunct professor at the Faculty of Medicine at the Technische Universität Dresden in Dresden (Germany).