Yesterday Jouni Bjorkman and I (Sandra Pierson) met with Ettore Rosso in his office in Room 004 of Building 11 to learn about LIBO.  Ettore. Rosso is a very nice, warm, man who participated in design, construction, and commissioning of LIBO, and also participates in marketing LIBO to the world community both inside and outside CERN.  Ettore. Rosso is from Italy originally, but after his PhD worked for 3 years as assistant professor at Modena University and as user at CERN, then became CERN staff member 34 years ago, where he has remained until the present time.  Ettore Rosso immediately felt comfortable at CERN, and especially liked the international make-up of the CERN scientific community.  He enjoys relating to people from many different countries.

Ettore. Rosso started to talk about LIBO by first explaining that analogies can be drawn between particle physics and light.  For example, the term BEAM OPTICS is used to talk about high energy particles being bent and focused by magnets in the same way that a beam of light can be bent by prisms and focused by lenses.  “Telescope” is analogous to “series of detectors”, and “calorimeter” to energy absorber.

  In general and in particular in LIBO, hadron therapy is used to treat difficult cases of cancer where tumors lie next to vital organs and therefore precision is needed in order to treat them.  In conventional therapy using first Cobalt and more recently Xrays,  a higher dose is needed to go to the tumor and kill the cells.  The disadvantage is that tissues lying in the path of the Xrays will also be affected by the Xrays and therefore good cells will die.  At present, over 5,000 installations worldwide use Xrays to kill tumors. To minimize this effect, the tumor can be attacked from up to nine different directions using small doses in the so called conformal radiotherapy.

  The advantage of using hadron therapy is that protons, or in some cases, pions, are aimed at the tumor, and they do not release their energy until they get to the tumor.  Cells of adjacent tissues are not affected.  Also, a lower dose is used.  This is because protons, ions, and pions are able to cross matter and deposit all their energy in the last 1-2mm.  Tissues crossed before the target receive only a minimal dose.  The result is a very precise instrument. 

  With medical imaging (for example PET), the precise shape and location of the tumor can be identified.  Then, it is possible to calculate with high accuracy exactly how much energy is needed to penetrate exactly up to the sick cells and kill the tumor.  The proton beam can be focused, the same way that light can be focused, only using magnets instead of lenses to do the focusing.  Once the tumor cells are hit with the protons, they die.  The dead tumor cells are then broken up and their parts reabsorbed by the other cells.  The tumor is seen to shrink and disappear.  In some cases, after it shrinks, it can be surgically removed with special fine instruments.

  This technology is available in several countries.  In the U.S. they use protons and in Japan, Carbon atoms which have been stripped of their electrons (Carbon ions).  These Carbon ions are heavier than protons and have a stronger impact on the DNA.  In Switzerland, the PSI (Paul Sherrer Institute) in Villigen Center used  pions and today protons generated by its cyclotrons.  There are three centers in the U.S. that use protons, and three in Japan and one in Darmstadt, Germany, that use Carbon ions.  In  Heidelberg, one is about to be built.  In Clatterbridge, UK, Nice, France, Villigen, Switzerland and in Catania, Italy, there are centers which treat eye melanoma with »60MeV protons with a high degree of success.

  Today’s medicine is concerned not only with prolonging life of the patients, but with preserving a high quality of life.  In the case of eye melanoma, it is important that treatment leave the patient both able to see, tumorless, and not disfigured.

  There are advantages to using LIBO.  (In Clatterbridge, UK, eye melanoma is treated successfully using LIBO) *.  LIBO is smaller and lower in cost to build than most cyclotrons.  It is proven that LIBO can use an installation’s existing cyclotron of at least 30MeV and act as a booster.  That is, LIBO can pick up particles which come out of a cyclotron and then accelerate them in a LINAC to a high frequency.  LIBO is both compact (it can fit in a corridor) and cheap to build.  Cost is usually figured on kilograms of equipment—the smaller, the cheaper (excluding miniaturization, which is very expensive.)  If an installation has 60MeV, which can be used to treat eye melanoma, and wants 200 MeV, which is needed to treat deep tumors, LIBO can be built in less than 13 meters, and installation can be made.

  There are other advantages to LIBO.  It can also be used with success in the medical field to produce radioisotopes.  To make radioisotopes, a cyclotron is needed which usually has a low energy and high intensity.  Not all isotopes can be used, as some have a very short half-life.  It is not possible to import those isotopes because they decay, so therefore an accelerator is needed to produce isotopes in situ.  Most medical centers have small cyclotrons which produce 11,18, or 30MeV protons.  If a medical center has a small cyclotron to produce isotopes, it can add a LINAC booster which will boost the energy and make more high energy protons.  In this way, a variety of illnesses can be treated.  However, the bottom energy is 30Mev.  Protons can come from any accelerator as long as they have 30MeV.

  LIBO can be useful to two departments in a medical center:  nuclear medicine and therapy.  LIBO can have 1 to 2 beams, and can be used both to produce radioisotopes and to kill tumors.  If a medical facility wants only to do therapy, it would not be cost-effective for it to buy LIBO.

  Another advantage of LIBO is that its mechanical construction can be done by a small company.  It would not be necessary to use a facility abroad for this construction—the public money could be spent on a local construction company.

  Ettore Rosso concluded his interview with us by giving us some idea of the ways practical applications of physics research are made.  He stressed the importance of good team work within an organization to succeed with projects.  He also has learned some ways of dealing with businesses which will build instruments designed in research laboratories.  For Ettore Rosso, this is a challenge.  Ettore Rosso has always thrived on challenge, from his early days studying physics at school, to working in a laboratory, to world marketing.  Ettore Rosso’s early background from childhood had a heavy concentration in classics.  His father taught Greek and Latin and encouraged Ettore to study those subjects as a young boy.  Ettore Rosso feels that his background in the humanities has helped him to have a humanistic approach to dealing with the marketing of physics applications.

  I was very impressed with what I learned about LIBO, its construction, its advantages, and technology transfer from Ettore Rosso.  He gave us over two hours of his time, and is a very nice man.  I feel that it is important to have people with Ettore Rosso’s talents in the technology transfer field at CERN, because he promotes good public relations and is very knowledgeable in his field.  This concludes my report on my interview with Ettore Rosso, Senior Physicist at CERN, regarding LIBO.

Sandra Pierson
July 17, 2002 

* Not true: for the moment only the prototype module of LIBO exists

 
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