The new Cell Irradiation Facility at the Lund Nuclear Probe

The CELLION project is directed towards the studies on cellular response to targeted single ions. This paper gives an account of the modifications made at the Lund sub-micron beam line in order to create a Single Ion Hit Facility for biological applications within the CELLION project.The most relevant new feature is the specially developed software used to locate the cells. A program for cell recognition and localization that gives the coordinates of the centre of the cells has been designed. The recognition is made online. A picture taken by a microscope is used as input parameter for the recognition program. Using V79 Chinese hamster cells, the recognition procedure can be done in less than 0.5 s for a picture size of 800 × 600 pixels with approximately 96% efficiency.This paper also reports target accuracy test results and the first non-targeted irradiation procedure performed at the Lund sub-micron beam line.