Proton therapy is an emerging cancer treatment technique. Charged particles, particularly protons, have been used to treat over 200,000 cancer patients at approximately 100 facilities worldwide, primarily for head and neck tumors located near critical healthy tissues. In Poland, one proton facility operates clinically at the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Krakow, with additional facilities planned. Protons offer the advantage of depositing most of their dose at a specific depth, known as the Bragg peak, which minimizes damage to surrounding healthy tissue. The spatial precision provided by the Bragg peak, however, makes proton therapy more sensitive to patient positioning and anatomical changes during treatment than conventional X-ray radiation therapy. Fully leveraging the potential of proton therapy requires the development of more accurate treatment planning and radiation detection techniques.

I will briefly refer to the history of ion beam therapy, its physics and biology principles, and its challenges. Furthermore, I will focus on research performed by my collaborators and me, considering recent advances in proton therapy medical physics. I will report on our development of Monte Carlo-based computational methods essential for biologically weighted particle therapy planning, and particularly, patient specific quality assurance (QA). Moreover, I will briefly review our work in the field of radiation detectors relevant to imaging, therapy monitoring, and radiation quality QA. Additionally, I will discuss our progress in nanoscale dosimetry, including DNA-damage-based treatment planning strategies, biological validation of the approach, and the development of nanoscale dosimetry detectors. 

Antoni Rucinski is a mid-career medical physics researcher and clinical medical physicist with professional qualifications recognized in Germany, Poland, and Spain. His clinical expertise encompasses proton and ion beam therapy, photons, brachytherapy, and nuclear medicine. He completed his PhD in 2013 at the University of Heidelberg and the Heidelberg Ion Beam Therapy Center (HIT) in Germany, where he conducted treatment planning studies for ion therapy in prostate cancer and contributed to the commissioning of proton and carbon ion gantry at HIT. In 2014, he furthered his clinical experience in clinical medical physics at the Heidelberg satellite hospital in Heilbronn, Germany. From 2015 to 2016, he was awarded a prestigious INFN postdoctoral fellowship at Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, where he conducted data analysis for nuclear physics experiments investigating secondary radiation produced by therapeutic helium, carbon, and oxygen beams. Since 2017, Dr. Rucinski has been a researcher at the Krakow Proton Beam Therapy Center in Poland, where he now serves as head of the R&D lab. Over the years, he has led multiple research projects in close collaboration with clinical medical physicists and medical doctors across hospitals in Krakow. In 2024, he received habilitation in physics.