Ion accelerator applications in medicine and cultural heritage

Formerly, accelerator laboratories were mainly dedicated to nuclear physics. Today, they are used in up-coming research fields and applications like material analysis and material science as well as biology, medicine or archaeology. Practical applications have been developed, involving hospitals, industry and even humanists in the use of accelerators. This paper focuses on some medical and analytical application!, of the HMI accelerator facility, especially for eye tumour therapy and archaeology. The innovation of techniques to measure the dose distribution, the development of an automated monitoring procedure allowing an improved and accelerated patient positioning, and the implementation of a modern treatment planning system will be presented first. In the second part, the employment of accelerators in better understanding of our cultural heritage will be shown. (C) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.