Organisation

Représentant: Yannick ARNOUD

The “Laboratoire de Physique Subatomique et de Cosmologie” (UMR 5821) is a joined research unit from the “Institut National de Physique Nucléaire and Physique des Particules” (IN2P3) of CNRS, the “Université Joseph Fourier Grenoble 1” and the “Institut Polytechnique de Grenoble, Grenoble INP”.

The activities of LPSC are oriented toward experimental and fundamental physics, with a large contribution in particle, astroparticle, nuclear, plasma physics but also developments for medical applications. The LPSC gathers more than 200 persons, 114 of them being researchers, post-docs and students, and 107 being engineers, technicians and administratives.

The DAMe team (Developments and Applications for Medicine) –(Project Leader:Yannick Arnoud) is developing tools in association with the Radiotherapy Service of the Grenoble public hospital (INSERM Unit U836, Grenoble Institut Neuroscience). The main project concerns the development of a detector for monitoring online the fluence (intensity and shape) of the beam used in Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy (IMRT), an advanced mode of high-precision radiotherapy. The characteristics of this transmission detector have been optimized based on Monte Carlo studies, (Geant4 and the GATE toolkits). The development of the transmission detector is part of the ISI INSPIRA Project, supported by OSEO from 2010 to 2014.
The other project concerns the prostate brachytherapy, a rising treatment technique used to cure prostate cancer. This technique is using different modalities, all of which being concern by the problem of dose distribution homogeneity. The seeds being implanted have a cylindrical shape. They are initially aligned and parallel but this arrangement tends to evolve in a more random distribution due to the non rigid state of the prostate. Their distribution is directly related to the dose distribution inside the target volume. So, it is necessary to accurately calculate the dose distribution to achieve a good clinical evaluation of the expected outcomes in order to take the appropriate measures if necessary. The LPSC is involved in both the 3D measurement of the elementary dose around a seed and the simulation of the total dose in the prostate, once the seeds location and orientation have been determined. The brachytherapy seeds characterisation is a 2 years TecSan project, from 2011 to 2012.

Both projects rely on simulation prediction, and close contacts have been established with the CREATIS group, in order to benefit from their expertise in simulation using the GATE toolkit.  Other contacts include the team 6 of the INSERM U836 Unit, for their ability to calibrate small dosimeters at the specific energies used in brachytherapy.