Hadron Therapy Driven by Multi-Terawatt Laser

At present time proton and carbon ion beams from conventional accelerators are used in medicine to eradicate tumor by a method called hadron therapy. Recently it was shown that multi-terawatt laser interacting with thin foils produces multi-MeV ion beam which is suitable for hadron therapy. The replacement of accelerator and bending magnets by laser can greatly decrease costs and even make the whole system portable. We are developing a new compact hadron therapy system which can be incorporated into existing infrastructure, driven by multi-terawatt laser and controlled by the computational system that allows us to optimize parameters of the irradiation dose for the patient by designing the laser-target interaction, resulting ion beam and its transport. The computational system is based on the integrated code encompassing the large-scale particle-in-cell simulation of laser-target interaction, a Monte-Carlo code for dose calculations, and a clinical software for therapy plan.