Helium ion beam therapy for the treatment of cancer was one of several developed and studied particle modalities in the 1950's, leading to clinical trials beginning in 1975 at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The trial shutdown was followed by decades of research and clinical silence on the topic while proton and carbon ion therapy made debuts at research facilities and academic hospitals worldwide. The lack of progression in understanding of principle facets of helium ion beam therapy in terms of physics, biological and clinical findings persist today, mainly attributable to its highly limited availability. Despite this major setback, there has been an increasing focus on evaluating and establishing clinical and research programs using helium ion beams, with both therapy and imaging initiatives to supplement the clinical palette of radiotherapy in the treatment of aggressive disease and sensitive clinical cases. Moreover, due its intermediate physical and radio-biological properties between proton and carbon ion beams, helium ions may provide a streamlined economic steppingstone towards an era of widespread use of multi-particle approaches to light and heavy ion therapy. This roadmap presents an overview of the current state-of-the-art and future directions of helium ion therapy: understanding physics and improving modeling, understanding biology and improving modeling, imaging techniques using helium ions and refining and establishing clinical approaches and aims from learned experience with protons. These topics are organized and presented into three main sections, outlining current and future tasks in establishing clinical and research programs using helium ion beams — A. Physics B. Biological and C. Clinical Perspectives.
Medical physics and biophysics
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Latest from us
Webinar on 'Helium Ion Beam Therapy' | Watch on-demand
Physics in Medicine & Biology (PMB), welcomed speakers Andrea Mairani, Thomas Tessonnier, and Semi Harrabia for a live discussion on the current state-of-the-art and future directions of helium ion therapy. This webinar was delivered in conjunction with the journals latest publication Roadmap: Helium ion therapy. Take a look at the on-demand recording here.
Physics in Medicine & Biology open Special Issues
The journal currently have a number of Special issues open for submission, including 'Electromagnetic Modeling for Brain Stimulation', and 'Focus on the Monte Carlo Method for Medical Applications: From Macro to Microscale'. Full details on submitting and proposed deadlines can be found on the Special issue pages.
Open Special Issues in Physiological Measurement
We welcome submission to our three Special Issues currently open, including 'Physiological Measurement in Extreme Environments', 'Approaches for Non-Invasive Objective Assessment of Myocardial Ischemia Across the Continuum of Clinical Care', and 'Multimodal Data Analysis and Fusion of Dynamic Physiological Signals and Electronic Health Records'. Full details on submitting and proposed deadlines can be found on the Special issue pages.
Roberts Best Paper Prize 2022
Physics in Medicine & Biology (PMB), in association with the journal owners, the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine (IPEM), jointly award this prize in honour of the first editor of PMB, John Roberts, who served from 1956 to 1960. The 2022 best paper is presented to authors, Jungwook Shin, Shu Xing, Lucas McCullum, Abdelkhalek Hammi, Jennifer Pursley, Camilo A Correa, Julia Withrow, Sean Domal, Wesley Bolch, Harald Paganetti and Clemens Grassberger, for their paper HEDOS&mdashXa computational tool to assess radiation dose to circulating blood cells during external beam radiotherapy based on whole-body blood flow simulations.
Welcome to Katia Parodi, new Editor-in-Chief of Physics in Medicine & Biology.
We welcome PMB's new Editor-in-Chief, Professor Katia Parodi of Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. "It is a great honour to become the new Editor-in-Chief of PMB...we will do our best to continue expanding the scope of the journal with exciting new trends, while preserving well established topical areas, focusing on therapeutic procedures and medical imaging. Our mission is to attract ground-breaking papers and offer the best experience to our authors and readers for a rapid and broad dissemination of cutting-edge physics research for medicine, physiology and biology". Find out more here.