MASR

European Journal of Radiology68S(2008)S1–S2IntroductionMASR—A tradition to develop the future‘In a world where the use of acronyms to describe concepts has become rather fashionable,MASR has become a signature standing for Medical Applications of Synchrotron Radiation. MASR is a platform to present a state-of-the-art showcase for a diverse community of researchers using synchrotron-generated X-rays for biomedical research,medical diagnosis and therapy. Its purpose is to bring together physicists,engineers and clini-cians to advance synchrotron techniques that potentially could improve the quality of medical diagnosis and therapy.In1987,a meeting dedicated entirely to the potential use of synchrotron-generated X-rays for coronary angiography was held in Frascati,Italy.Although the properties of synchrotron light were known since1947and have been used for research since the1960s,the interest to use the highly collimated X-ray beam generated by synchrotrons for clinical purposes had been fairly recent.Thus,the meeting in Frascati can be said to have been a visionary one,even though it had only one single diagnostic technique on its agenda.A follow-up meeting was held in Daigo,Japan,in1992.By this time it had become obvious that,despite the initial enthusiasm,not all synchrotron facilities were equally suited for medical research.Unlike serially produced X-ray generators for imaging purposes in the hospital environment,each synchrotron facility has its unique technical parameters.The requirements for monetary support are significantly higher where pre-clinical research with a tentative view on clinical trials is planned, compared to studies for instance in material sciences.Equally important is the availability of at least one dedicated team of clinician researchers that can help to direct the development of the technique in collaboration with physicists and engineers until it is potentially suitable for clinical trials.This is in itself a chal-lenge,because the work strategies of physicists and engineers are in some respects very different from that of a physician:where for physicists and engineers the development of the technique towards a useful end product such as a novel imaging technique is the typical approach to work,the physician perceives this developmental process as a rather lengthy preparation to use the newly developed technique to improve the quality of care for his or her patients.Where the work of physicists and engineers is almostfinished,the work only starts for the physician.This difference in attitude towards the same goal,to develop syn-chrotron techniques for medical use,requires much patience on all sides as well as willingness to learn the lingua franca of the colleagues from differentfields of science.When the new European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF)was designed in the1980s,the plan included a beam-line dedicated entirely to biomedical research.Based on work done previously in Germany,Japan and in the U.S.A.,the antic-ipated focus for research was on coronary ing a synchrotron-based image acquisition technique such as K-edge digital subtraction angiography(KEDSA).While the focus for medical use of synchrotron radia-tion initially had been on diagnostic techniques,the concept of microbeam radiation therapy(MRT)for malignant brain tumours was developed as a therapeutic concept at the National Synchrotron Light Source(NSLS)in the Brookhaven Labora-tories from the late1980s.Thefirst MASR meeting covering a wider spectrum of diagnostic approaches and MRT,was held in Haga,Japan,in1997.When the MASR meeting was hosted in Grenoble,France,in2001,the French group was able to report on theirfirst clinical angiography trials at the ESRF,using KEDSA as image acquisition method for coronary angiography. Thus,the ESRF had become the5th synchrotron facility interna-tionally(after SSRL and NSLS in the U.S.A,the Photon Factory in Japan and HASYLAB in Germany)to conduct clinical trials employing synchrotron techniques for medical diagnostic.The use of synchrotron-generated X-rays for functional lung imag-ing,pioneered at the NSLS,has been advanced at the ESRF in pre-clinical research.After the biomedical beamline had become established at the ESRF,members of the MRT team,lead by the Swiss pathologist Jean Laissue and Per Spanne from the ESRF,began to conduct MRT experiments in Grenoble.Dur-ing the latter part of the1990s and early2000s,synchrotron stereotactic radiotherapy combined with photoactivation therapy (SSRT-PAT),another synchrotron-based therapeutic concept, was developed by the team of Franc¸ois Estève in Grenoble.By the time the MASR meeting was held in Trieste,Italy,in 2004,the‘therapy fraction’between the conference attendees was already well developed.Also,mammography had become a new focus as a diagnostic synchrotron technique.At the most recent MASR meeting held in2007in Saska-toon,Canada,one of the highlights was the report of the Italian team members about theirfirst clinical mammography trial con-ducted at the Italian synchrotron facility ELETTRA.The French0720-048X/$–see front matter©2008Published by Elsevier Ireland Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.ejrad.2008.04.025S2Introduction/European Journal of Radiology68S(2008)S1–S2colleagues reported on their plans forfirst clinical trials in syn-chrotron radiotherapy to begin within the next two years.Two new biomedical beamlines,at the Canadian Light Source and at the Australian Synchrotron Project,are scheduled to become operational within the next two years.The design of and the work at those new beamlines will profit from the experience with previous biomedical work at the international synchrotron facilities.The biomedical synchrotron research community is still relatively small.Presently,the diagnostic and therapeutic techniques developed at the synchrotron depend on the availabil-ity of specific characteristics of synchrotron-generated X-rays. However,efforts to develop compact synchrotron sources are already under way.This will,at some time in the future, enable us to administer diagnostic and therapeutic techniques developed at the synchrotron in the hospital environment, where we expect it to improve the quality of patient care significantly.Dean Chapman Department of Physics and Astronomy,Louisiana State University,202Nicholson Hall,Baton Rouge,LA70802,USAE-mail address:dean.chapman@usask.ca15April2008。