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Abstract

Cancer constitutes the second largest fraction of lethal illnesses in Germany. Several methods for its cure have been developed, one of which is the irradiation of the tumor tissue with charged particles. Their deleterious effect can in principle be limited to the tumor tissue, but a precise knowledge of the tissue composition along the particle beam is needed. This composition can, however, not be measured with high precision, and is further influenced by a possible misalignment as well as the movement of the patient. To avoid errors in the irradiation which could lead either to a non-complete tumor destruction or to damage introduced to healthy tissue, a method that is capable of determining the particle range in real-time is desirable. The only one used so far for quality assurance is not able to provide information in real-time. In this thesis, a technique is described that measures the secondary particles created upon irradiation with antiprotons with a rather simple detector set-up, and uses the direction of flight information to reconstruct the annihilation vertex distribution in the irradiated tissue. The applicability of this technique is verified in this thesis and compared to simulations.