Advanced Sandwich Composite Cores for Patient Support in Advanced Clinical Imaging and Oncology Treatment

Ongoing advances in both imaging and treatment for oncology purposes have seen a significant rise in the use of not only the individual imaging modalities, but also their combination in single systems such as PET-CT and PET-MRI when planning for advanced oncology treatment, the most demanding of which is proton therapy. This has identified issues in the availability of suitable materials upon which to support the patient undergoing imaging and treatment owing to the differing requirements for each of the techniques. Sandwich composites are often selected to solve this issue but there is little information regarding optimum materials for their cores. In this paper we present a range of materials which are suitable for such purposes and evaluate the performance for use in terms of PET signal attenuation, proton beam stopping, MRI signal shading and X-Ray CT visibility. We find that Extruded Polystyrene offers the best compromise for patient support and positioning structures across all modalities tested, allowing for significant savings in treatment planning time and delivering more efficient treatment with lower margins.