ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Oncol.
Sec. Radiation Oncology
Volume 15 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fonc.2025.1648237
This article is part of the Research TopicTechnology Developments in Proton TherapyView all 7 articles
A compact, lightweight, variable-energy cyclotron for conventional and FLASH ion beam radiotherapy
Provisionally accepted
Daniel Winklehner1*
Joseph V. Minervini1*
Leslie Bromberg1Eric Forton2Jerome Mandrillon2Philip C. Michael1Alexey Radovinsky1- 1Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, United States
- 2Ion Beam Applications SA, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
Select one of your emails
You have multiple emails registered with Frontiers:
Notify me on publication
Please enter your email address:
If you already have an account, please login
You don't have a Frontiers account ? You can register here
The advantage of ion beam radiotherapy for cancer lies in its low dose proximal and distal to the tumor, owed to an energy-dependent depth-dose profile, the Bragg-peak. We present a new conceptual accelerator design that provides smooth variation of the output beam energy from 70 to 230 MeV/amu without degraders, which compromise the quality and intensity of the beam and produce secondary radiation. Removing all magnetic iron from the device yields a linear relationship between coil current, cyclotron magnetic field, and, thus, the output beam energy. Hence, we create a much lighter system with improved magnetic shielding and significantly reduced secondary radiation that can provide ion beams (e.g., proton or carbon) at variable energy while providing the high beam intensity necessary for the promising FLASH technique at all output energies.
Keywords: Radiotherapy, Cyclotron, Superconducting, FLASH radiotherapy, Particle accelerator
Received: 16 Jun 2025; Accepted: 25 Sep 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Winklehner, V. Minervini, Bromberg, Forton, Mandrillon, Michael and Radovinsky. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Daniel Winklehner, winklehn@mit.edu
Joseph V. Minervini, jvminervini@novum-industria.com
Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.