Achromatic and Uncoupled Medical Gantry

One of the functions of a medical gantry is to irradiate a tumor from different angles to reduce the dose received by the healthy tissue which surrounds the tumor. The rotation of the gantry rotates also its quadrupoles that focus the beam, as a result the beam is “coupled” in the sense that the horizontal motion of the beam particles is affected by the vertical motion and vice-versa therefore the beam spot size at the tumor may vary with the angular orientation of the gantry. Although such a beam-coupling is inevitable in a rotated gantry in which the horizontal plane is not the symmetry plane of the quadrupoles, it is possible to find a solution that the optics of the gantry“appears uncoupled” at any angular orientation of the gantry. As we show in the paper, the condition of an uncoupled gantry is equivalent to an uncoupled linear-beam-transport-matrix which is independent of the angular orientation of the gantry, therefore the beam spot size at the location of the tumor is independent of the orientation of the gantry. In this paper we present the theoretical basis to generate the beam optics for a gantry which is constrained to provide uncoupled and also achromatic beamtransport to the location of the tumor. In addition we present the layout of the magnetic elements and the optics of a medical gantrywhich satisfies the achromaticity and uncoupled conditions.