Use spine2d model as paper doll
The medical world was initially sceptical – the technology seemed too unmanageable at the time. In the following year, CPT moved on to successfully treat several other cancer patients. We made a huge effort to ensure that everything was absolutely safe for the patient," Grossmann notes. "We were all firmly convinced we had mastered the technology. The team of specialists ensured that the technology functioned smoothly and eventually everyone was able to breathe a sigh of relief: the treatment had gone exactly as planned – just as Martin Grossmann and Tony Lomax had expected. The tolerance was a question of millimetres: "A proton beam is like an extremely sharp tool," Martin Grossmann stresses. That Monday he helped to place the patient in the exact position for the proton beams to precisely target the area of the body to be irradiated. "You can treat as many plastic dolls or models as much as you want, but when you have a live patient lying there, it’s a totally different experience," says the medical physicist Tony Lomax, one of the development team. The purpose of the intervention was to irradiate these rogue metastases using the new technique.ĭespite meticulous preparations, the team was nervous.
USE SPINE2D MODEL AS PAPER DOLL SKIN
The 62-year old man from the Canton of Lucerne had malignant skin cancer that had already formed metastases in his brain. The moment of truth came on 25 November 1996: a human patient lay waiting in the treatment room. Back in the 1990s he was part of a team of 15 researchers led by Hans Blattmann, Eros Pedroni and Gudrun Goitein developing a new technology for treating cancer patients: spot scanning, also known as pencil beam scanning. "We were huddled together, peering anxiously at the monitor relaying images from the treatment room," recalls Martin Grossmann, a physicist with the Center for Proton Therapy (CPT) at PSI.
It was Monday, and the team was gathered in the control room at the Center for Proton Therapy. The fact that the success story started at PSI was more than just a coincidence. Meanwhile this technique has become a standard procedure worldwide and since 1996 has been used to treat around 2000 cancer patients at PSI alone – over a third of them children and young people. This technique developed at PSI scans and irradiates deep-seated tumours with a pencil-thin beam of charged particles, killing cancer cells with extreme precision while preserving the surrounding healthy tissue. Villigen, - On 25 November 1996, the Center for Proton Therapy at the Paul Scherrer Institute PSI treated a cancer patient using the spot-scanning technique for the very first time – a world premiere.