Proton therapy needs heavy equipment. For instance, the Orsay proton therapy center, in France, (see figure) uses a synchrocyclotron weighing 900 tons in total. Such equipment was formerly only available within centers studying particle physics. In the case of the Orsay installation, the treatment machine was converted from particle research usage to medical usage.
Presently (end of 2008), there are proton therapy centers in Canada, China, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan (5 centers), Korea, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, and USA (6 centers), altogether 26 installations, and over 60000 patients have been treated so far.
Proton therapy for ocular tumors is a special case since this treatment requires only a comparably low energy (about 70 MeV). In the United Kingdom, it is currently only available at the Clatterbridge Centre for Oncology in Bebington on the Wirral, Merseyside. In the USA, it is available in Sacramento, California at the University of California, Davis, , the UC Davis Proton Facility which is operated exclusively by the UC San Francisco Department of Radiation Oncology. Since 2004, the Midwest Proton Radiotherapy Institute at Indian University, and, in 2006, the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston TX, and the University of Florida Proton Therapy Institution, Jacksonville, Florida.
