Laurent Kelleter visits MedAustron for a secondment
In July, OMA Fellow Laurent Kelleter from University College London (UCL) joined MedAustron for an OMA secondment. Since then, he’s been working closely with OMA Fellow Andrea de Franco and his supervisor Claus Schmitzer as part of the group responsible for the MedAustron synchrotron, offering a unique opportunity to gain first-hand experience about the operation of a modern particle therapy centre.
The current tasks include the commissioning of the new carbon ion beam line – one of only about a dozen worldwide – with a focus on synchrotron optics and third order slow resonant extraction optimisation. An important milestone was reached in mid-August, when the carbon beam became first available to medical physicists.
Laurent is also involved in the performance improvement of the proton beam line. The project aims at increasing the proton beam intensity available for patient treatment, thus reducing treatment time and increasing patient throughput. In the course of this project he contributes to range/energy fluctuation measurements and verifications to assess the need of additional safety systems.
Another focus of Laurent’s stay at MedAustron was the work with the group from the technical university of Vienna (TU Wien) performing non-clinical research. This project had already kick-started with a joint beam test at MedAustron earlier this year. The efforts focus on exploring a combination of the detector systems being developed in Vienna and at UCL for proton radiography.
At the same time, AVA Fellow Miha Cerv based at CIVIDEC in Vienna visited MedAustron and joined a tour in the synchrotron hall. Miha, Andrea and Laurent will stay in close contact in order to benefit from each others expertise and deepen the ties between the two partner networks OMA and AVA.