Application of Cyclotrons in Brachytherapy

Cyclotrons are particle accelerator machines which have many applications in industry, technology and medicine. Cyclotrons play an important role in medicine and about 50% of the all particle accelerators running in the world are used in medicine for radiation therapy, medical radioisotopes production, and biomedical research. In this short review the use of cyclotrons for a radiation therapy method, brachytherapy, is discussed. Brachytherapy is a form of radiotherapy where a radioactive source placed on or in the tissue to be irradiated. For a long period the production of radioactive isotopes for medical applications was essentially done in nuclear reactors but due to some advantages of radioisotopes production with cyclotron over a nuclear reactor, in the last two decades several types of cyclotrons have been developed to meet the specific demands of radionuclide production. This talk will briefly explain the technical design, beam transfer and beam delivery systems of cyclotron for brachytherapy radioisotope production; and also will shortly describe some detail of 103Pd production in the following: production, targetry, radiochemical separation and seed fabrication.