Beamline optics design of a new two-room treatment suite at the McLaren Proton Therapy Center

A fixed-beam, two room suite with upright chairs for patient positioning, is being installed at the McLaren Proton Therapy Center (MPTC). The MPTC is an operational, multi-room cancer treatment center. The new suite adds a third (A) and fourth (B) room by branching off upstream of the two clinically active half-gantry treatment rooms. This imposed a number of constraints on the beamlines of the new suite. The new beamline uses a Y-shaped selection dipole to switch between the suite’s room A and room B. The design was further constrained by the need to replicate the clinically active rooms’ beam characteristics at the new patient locations. This paper provides an overview of the methodology of the design studies for the new beamlines together with selected results. The work helped to establish the feasibility of installing a two-room treatment suite into a space originally designed for a gantry-based single treatment room.