Soft error measurement for carbon ion radiotherapy

Le résumé fourni par la source

The increasing use of cardiac implantable electronic devices (CIEDs) has raised concerns regarding potential soft errors during radiotherapy. Soft errors in CIEDs can lead to device malfunction, risking serious complications, such as ventricular tachycardia, that may require cardiopulmonary resuscitation. This study aimed to assess and compare the risks of soft errors in CIEDs exposed to radiation therapy using field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The FPGAs were placed on an acrylic phantom and subjected to 10 min of X-ray or carbon-beam irradiation. The number of memory inversions, counted as soft errors, was studied for X-ray energies of 6, 10, or 15 MV and carbon beam energies of 290, 380, or 400 MeV/u, utilizing a 4-cm range shifter and a 6-cm spread-out Bragg peak for carbon beams. The results indicated that soft errors were minimal with X-rays below 10 MV but increased for 15 MV X-rays, and increasing the carbon beam energy correlated with more soft errors. In the measurement with a 400 MeV/u carbon beam, soft errors significantly increased with the smaller irradiation field, probably due to blocking the carbon ions by the collimator and increased neutron generation. And soft errors decreased with increasing distance from the center of the irradiation field to the FPGAs. Based on the experimental results using 15MV X-rays, it was shown that carbon-ion therapy could also be performed with acceptable risk. These observations may be associated with variations in the neutron generation sources, necessitating further verification through simulations and alternative methodologies. Although further studies are necessary to verify the impact of circuit design and relationship to malfunctions in clinical devices because this study used only one type of FPGA, this study contributes crucial foundational data for understanding the risk of soft errors in CIEDs during radiation therapy.

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