Hadron-therapy: applications of accelerator technologies to tumour treatments

<!--HTML-->In the last fifteen years the irradiation of solid tumours with beams of charged hadrons has seen a spectacular development with more than 55,000 patients treated worldwide with proton beams and about 5,000 patients with carbon ion beams. The first part of the seminar discusses (i) the reasons for using both protons and carbon ions in cancer therapy, (ii) the accelerators used and (iii) to the present status and the future needs of hadron-therapy centres. In the second part the technologies of dose delivery are described emphasising the main challenges of modern radiotherapy, in particular the treatment of moving organs. In this framework the properties of the beams produced by conventional accelerators (cyclotrons and synchrotrons) are compared with the ones due to two novel approaches based on fast cycling machines, as FFAGs and cyclinacs.