Recent progress of HIMAC for sophisticated heavy-ion cancer radiotherapy

The NIRS has carried out carbon-ion radiotherapy (RT) with HIMAC since 1994. On the basis of their ten-year HIMAC experience, NIRS has developed a standard-type CIRT facility in order to boost availability of carbon-ion RT in Japan. Work has been carried out at its pilot facility at Gunma University since 2010. The current projects of the pilot facility include Saga-HIMAT and i-ROCK, promoted by the Kanagawa prefectural cancer center. Toward the further sophisticated conformal carbon-ion RT with HIMAC, the NIRS has since 2006 been developing new treatment technologies, such as a fast 3D rescanning with a pencil beam and a compact rotating gantry.