The ICTR-PHE 2014 conference, co-chaired by Jacques Bernier and Manjit Dosanjh, introduced a fresh approach to the medical applications that the fundamental research conducted at CERN can have. Detector techniques developed by physicists are no longer confined to cancer treatment; innovative solutions for better healthcare are on the way, while physics, computing and simulation tools are increasingly important in the medical field. Over half of the world’s particle accelerators are used in medicine, while the same is true for particle detector technology.

The workshop was a great success, bringing together some 400 physicists, biologists and healthcare professionals from around the world. An overwhelming number of proposals -from new detectors and next-generation imaging techniques, to accelerator-based facilities for making new isotopes such as radiotracers and drugs- were presented at the ICTR-PHE 2014. As the last ICTR-PHE meeting was two years ago, many scientists came back to Geneva to catch up with the latest developments in the field.

Participants at the ICTR-PHE conference at the International Conference Centre Geneva (Image: Anna Pantelia/CERN)

Presentations covered various activities related to the technologies developed at CERN, including the design of specialized accelerators for cancer therapy, the conversion of the Low Energy Ion Ring (LEIR) into a biomedical facility, radio-isotope production using ISOLDE, medical imaging and applications to improve dosimetry for patients and, finally, large scale computing applications.

In a number of plenary sessions and in a special poster session, experts in different fields gave presentations, highlighting the importance of multidisciplinary collaborations among chemists, biologists, physicists and physicians. CERN serves as an excellent example of an international collaboration and “the challenge is to apply this successful model to multidisciplinary collaborations in the healthcare field” says Manjit Dosanjh, CERN’s Life Sciences Advisor and member of the Knowledge Transfer group.

Ugo Amaldi, director of the DELPHI Collaboration at LEP for 13 years, later Professor of Medical Physics in Milan and founder of the Italian Foundation for Hadrontherapy (TERA), discussed the beauty and usefulness of Physics in his public talk.  Professor Amaldi explained how the beauty of particle physics has always gone hand in hand with useful applications, and gave an overview of CERN’s contributions to cancer therapy, as well as possible future directions for research and synergies between physics and medicine.

David Townsend, an early pioneer of the development of PET technology, offered an overview of the evolution of imaging technologies. Townsend emphasized the need to reduce the radiation dose in cancer treatment and shake off some of the prejudices related to the amount of dangerous radiation that patients receive with certain imaging techniques.

Besides the technical revolution that made PET/MRI possible, David Townsend underlined the imperative need to reduce the radiation dose from imaging, not necessarily because it causes cancer, but because people fear that it will cause cancer.

Looking forward to the next ICTR-PHE. Goobdye to everyone.

The PH Department was strongly represented at the conference.  Several groups in this Department are involved in medical-physics projects, as well as in detector development projects and the development of new simulation toolkits, used by the medical community.

You can read more about the role of the PH teams in developing medical application in October’s issue of the PH newsletter: http://ep-news.web.cern.ch/issues/2013/october

Read also the article on the: 4 pillars of wisdom: CERN technologies find medical applications  by Manuela Cirilli, Majit Dosanjh and Sparsh Navin.

Find out more about ICTP-PHE 2014 conference in the conference’s official website.