Recent progress and future plan of heavy-ion radiotherapy facility

The carbon-ion radiotherapy (RT) with HIMAC has been conducted since 1994, and the accumulated treatment number exceeded 9,000 in May 2014. During the last two decades, NIRS has developed both the accelerator and beam-delivery technologies related to the carbon-ion RT, which has brought several carbon-ion RT facilities in Japan. At present, NIRS has developed a carbon-ion rotating gantry with the superconducting technology to be operated from 2016. As the future plan, NIRS has developed a direct acceleration system of positron-emission beams for verification on an irradiation field, and NIRS also just starts a design study of a superconducting synchrotron ring for carbon-ion RT.