Operational Status of the University of Washington Med- Ical Cyclotron Facility

The University of Washington Medical Cyclotron Facility (UWMCF) is built around a Scanditronix MC50 compact cyclotron that was commissioned in 1984 and has been in continual use since. Its primary use is in the production of 50.5 MeV protons for fast neutron therapy. While this proton energy is too low for clinical proton therapy, it is ideal for proton therapy research in small animal models. In addition to the protons used for fast neutron therapy and proton therapy research, the MC50 is able to accelerate other particles at variable energies. This makes it useful for medical isotope research, including isotopes such as At, Re, and Sn that are being developed to target and treat metastatic disease at the cellular level. The original accelerator and therapy control systems were run on a DEC PDP-11 with a custom centralized I/O system built around the Z80 processor and chipset. Over the last 10 years we have continually been upgrading the controls while remaining operational, moving to a distributed system developed with the open source Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) toolkit.