Proton Accelerator Tour

Treatments 23, 24, and 25 are complete, all rather smoothly. This was a week where a large number of patients were finishing their treatments so there was quite a shuffle in the schedules but mine has remained the same. Doesn't appear to be a lot of demand for the 6:15 am treatment slot.

Saturday was the Accelerator tour which they give once a month. This was our first chance to see the tour as they did not have one in December because of the holidays. To say the least it was an amazing sight, the mechanical equipment that supports the treatment was some of the most complicated I have seen. It was crammed into a relatively small space, about the size of a basketball court. There was high pressure piping, vacuum lines, huge magnets, and large power supply cabinets. The power supply cabinets were very similar to the control cabinets at a power plant, except that the power was coming in rather than going out. From the equipment tags it looked like there was about 5MW of load for the magnets that accelerate the protons alone so my guess that the total load for the hospital complex is 15 to 20 MW total. Their load must be a power managers nightmare because it pulses every 4 seconds with about 3 MW of load to jump start the protons which must be very hard on the electrical equipment. The craftmanship of the piping, wiring, and piping was very good, it was all clearly tagged with safety devices and operating instructions. They quoted a goal of 98% availability, which is very aggressive considering the kind of specialized equipment they maintain. The technicians did a good job of explaining the equipment if you have an engineering background. For instance, they described the amount of protons in a typical treatment as 7.6 x 10 ^23 . The guy next to me asked how much was that and I answered, " a lot" and he was satisfied. They mentioned that most of the outages are caused by computer hardware and software issues, with actual mechanical equipment failures being rather rare.

Ruth enjoyed the tour as she teaches technology, it was fun for to hear what advances technology will make in the future in positioning of the patient. It will basically become much more automated, and they hope to be able to treat roughly double the amount of patients. My first thought is that they would have to make significant improvements in soft infrastructure such as waiting rooms, dressing rooms and patient communication if they wanted to come anywhere close to that goal. For some reason they haven't asked me about my thoughts on this.

The bottom photo today is of the pipe that carries, accelerates, and shapes the proton beam for Gantry 3, my little home for 30 minutes or so every day. I can hear various sounds coming from the "back room" as they prepare for treatment so it was fun for me to see the equipment. The top picture is of the area that they strip off the proton from a hydrogen molecule and dump in to the accelerator pipe.

I am still working on my theme statement for 2006. More on that later.