Enhanced Proton Tracking with ASTRA Using Calorimetry and Deep Learning

Recently, we proposed a novel range detector concept named ASTRA. ASTRA is optimized to accurately measure (better than 1%) the residual energy of protons with kinetic energies in the range from tens to a few hundred MeVs at a very high rate of O(100 MHz). These combined performances are aimed at achieving fast and high-quality proton Computerized Tomography (pCT), which is crucial to correctly assessing treatment planning in proton beam therapy. Despite being a range telescope, ASTRA is also a calorimeter, opening the door to enhanced tracking possibilities based on deep learning. Here, we review the ASTRA concept, and we study an alternative tracking method that exploits calorimetry. In particular, we study the potential of ASTRA to deal with pile-up protons by means of a novel tracking method based on semantic segmentation, a deep learning network architecture that performs classification at the pixel level.