The Neutron Capture Therapy Research Program at New England Medical Center and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The T-NEMC/MIT program in neutron capture therapy (NCT) is a collaborative research endeavor between T-NEMC (one of the principal tertiary care teaching hospitals in the Boston area) and the Nuclear Reactor Laboratory at MIT, where the MIT Research Reactor, MITR-II, is located. The program has been federally funded since 1987 by the US Department of Energy, and a recent renewal continues funding through 1993. This paper briefly reviews the program's accomplishments over the past 3-4 years. To gain a better intuitive understanding of the parameters relating to the optimization of neutron beams for NCT, the authors have carried out a number of monoenergetic neutron beam Monte Carlo simulations using the MCNP code. Using figures of merit such as 'advantage depth' (AD) and 'advantage ratio' (AR), previously devised as an aid to neutron beam design, they have shown that a wide range of epithermal neutron beam energies may be quite acceptable for NCT. This provided some confidence to the use of aluminum and sulphur resonance scattering filters which they proposed for the design of a practical epithermal neutron beam at MITR-II