Jayde Livingstone - Imaging and Medical Beamline, Australian Synchrotron

The ESRF lack a fully integrated preclinical system and clinical dosimetry protocol for spatially fractionated beams such as MRT, but offers a well-established clinical research environment with fully and precisely benchmarked X-ray characterisation tools. Our research synergy is thus evident and in October 2014 a collaboration was established on clinical dosimetry methods for spatially fractionated X-ray beams. Initiated by Jean-François Adam (Medical Physicist, Grenoble Alpes University and Grenoble University Hospital, Labex PRIMES WP1), it involves the Grenoble
medical research team using the ESRF and Dr Jayde Livingstone, beamline scientist and medical physicist on the IMBL. The aim of this collaboration is to share expertise and resources on these groundbreaking medical physics issues. In particular, in the past two years, extensive characterisation of novel detectors and sensors at the Australian Synchrotron, lead by Jayde Livingstone, has demonstrated that MRT dose can be accurately measured. This opens the way to developing a clinical dosimetry protocol for MRT. This initial work was recently presented at the international conference on Medical Applications of Synchrotron Radiation (Villard de Lans, October 2015) and submitted in January 2016 for publication in Medical Physics (Livingstone J, Stevenson AW, Butler DJ, Häusermann D, Adam JF (2016). Characterization of a synthetic single crystal diamond detector for dosimetry in spatially fractionated synchrotron x-ray fields. Medical Physics 43 (7), pp.4283 – 4293). This collaboration focuses on sharing knowledge and resources to develop this innovative
radiotherapy technique to clinical trials in both countries. The specific objective of the proposed visits is to collaborate on experimental dosimetry in clinical synchrotron radiotherapy techniques and merging the knowledge, equipment and methods on both research platforms. This is a vital step in the development of a uniform clinical dosimetry code of practice in synchrotron radiotherapy. The Grenoble research team has pioneered the field of medical applications of synchrotron radiation and are the first team to have taken synchrotron-based radiotherapy to clinical trials (SSRT, see above). The Australian involvement is indeed more recent but they are catching up, even overtaking, due to extensive clinical community support, the 2015 installation of
a dedicated preclinical MRT system (commissioned and characterised by J. Livingstone) that mimics clinical irradiation environments and, most importantly, extensive efforts towards routine clinical dosimetry for MRT.
In the framework of the collaboration, Jayde Livingstone benefits from the clinical environment of the ESRF medical beamline by working on an existing human irradiation installation. In exchange JF Adam, his team and the local medical physics community benefit from the expertise in experimental ‘small radiation field dosimetry’ and ‘new in vivo dosimetry methods based on spectroscopy’ brought by Jayde Livingstone, with complimentary experiments performed on IMBL at the Australian Synchrotron. This collaboration will deliver accurate and reliable dosimetry
methods that should be recognised as state-of-the-art for innovative radiotherapy modalities.