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A cooperation program on Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) between National Tsing Hua University (NTHU) and Taipei Veterans General Hospital (TPEVGH) was established in 2008. Clinical trial of recurrent head-and-neck cancer is the goal of the program. In this study, treatment plannings of two head-and-neck cancer cases are performed using treatment planning system THORplan developed at NTHU of Taiwan. The patients are assumed to be irradiated under current THOR epithermal neutron beam. The prescription dose is 20 Gy-Eq for at least 80% of tumor volume. The irradiation time to reach the target tumor dose can be kept within 1h. The skin dose is within the limiting dose of 11 Gy-Eq. The spinal cord dose is well within the limiting dose of 10 Gy-Eq. The use of an extension collimator for easier patient positioning is helpful in reducing the dose of eye lens to within the dose limit of 5 Gy-Eq. The irradiation time, however, will increase slightly due to the increase of source-to-tumor distance. The CPU time for treatment planning calculation is ~10 h. With the use of user friendly treatment planning system THORplan, dose planning for BNCT at THOR can be easily performed., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

This paper aims to evaluate the performance of the source description of the THOR BNCT beam via different measurement techniques in different phantoms. The measurement included (1) the absolute reaction rate measurement of a set of triple activation foils, (2) the neutron and gamma-ray dose rates measured using the paired ionization chamber method, and (3) the relative reaction rate distributions obtained using the indirect neutron radiography. Three source descriptions, THOR-Y09, surface source file RSSA, and THOR-50C, were tested. The comparison results concluded that THOR-Y09 is a well-tested source description not only for neutron components, but also for gamma-ray component., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)