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Particle minibeam therapy has demonstrated the potential for better healthy tissue sparing due to spatial fractionation of the delivered dose. Especially for heavy ions, the spatial fractionation could enhance the already favorable differential biological effectiveness at the target and the entrance region. Moreover, spatial fractionation could even be a viable option for bringing ions heavier than carbon back into patient application. To understand the effect of minibeam therapy, however, requires careful conduction of pre-clinical experiments, for which precise knowledge of the minibeam characteristics is crucial. This work introduces the use of high-spatial-resolution CMOS sensors to characterize collimator-produced carbon ion minibeams in terms of lateral fluence distribution, secondary fragments, track-averaged linear energy transfer distribution, and collimator alignment. Additional simulations were performed to further analyze the parameter space of the carbon ion minibeams in terms of beam characteristics, collimator positioning, and collimator manufacturing accuracy. Finally, a new concept for reducing the neutron dose to the patient by means of an additional neutron shield added to the collimator setup is proposed and validated in simulation. The carbon ion minibeam collimator characterized in this work is used in ongoing pre-clinical experiments on heavy ion minibeam therapy at the GSI.

This article belongs to the Special Issue Medical Applications of Particle Physics