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The activity in accelerator development for accelerator-based BNCT (AB-BNCT) both worldwide and in Argentina is described. Projects in Russia, UK, Italy, Japan, Israel, and Argentina to develop AB-BNCT around different types of accelerators are briefly presented. In particular, the present status and recent progress of the Argentine project will be reviewed. The topics will cover: intense ion sources, accelerator tubes, transport of intense beams, beam diagnostics, the (9)Be(d,n) reaction as a possible neutron source, Beam Shaping Assemblies (BSA), a treatment room, and treatment planning in realistic cases.

A project aimed at the development of an accelerator facility devoted to Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) is ongoing at the National Atomic Energy Commission of Argentina [1]. In a first stage of development, the accelerator will be capable of delivering proton or deuteron beams of 30 mA at about 1.4 MeV which is suitable for neutron production through the 9 Be(d,n) reaction. In this context, deep-tumor treatment capabilities of neutron beams produced by this reaction have been thoroughly studied in the last few years. Our previous studies based on a Snyder head phantom showed very encouraging results for a neutron field produced by bombarding a thin Be target (8 µm) with a 30 mA beam of 1.45 MeV deuterons. In this work we evaluate the performance of the proposed neutron source for the treatment of a real patient with diagnosed glioblastoma multiforme (GBM). The patient's head with a 4.2 cm 3 tumor within the occipital lobe of the brain was modeled by 11025 voxels from a computed tomography stack. The absorbed dose rate was computed via the Monte Carlo N-Particle code (MCNP) and the neutron beam direction was determined based on the location of the lesion using the NCTPlan code, a treatment planning code widely used in BNCT. The results derived from the simulations were assessed prescribing 11 Gy-Eq as the peak dose to normal brain, according to clinical protocols. Preliminary results show that a significant peak dose of 47 Gy-Eq can be delivered to the tumor with the proposed scheme in a single-field irradiation of 60 minutes while keeping the average whole brain dose lower than 4 Gy-Eq. These results are comparable to those obtained with the 7 Li(p,n) 7 Be reaction, which provides a better quality neutron field for BNCT. Moreover, the dose performances obtained with the proposed neutron source are comparable to those achieved in reported phase I/II clinical trials. These promising results strengthen the prospects for a potential use of the 9 Be(d,n) 10 B reaction for BNCT brain tumor treatments and for the implementation of an operational AB-BNCT facility in Argentina in the relatively short term.

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