Radiation therapy aims to deliver the prescribed amount of dose to a tumour
at the same time as sparing the surrounding tissues as much as possible. In
charged particle therapy, delivering the prescribed dose is equivalent to
delivering the prescribed number of ions of a given energy at each position of
the irradiation field. The accurate delivery is committed to a dose delivery
(DD) system that shapes, guides and controls the beam before the patient
entrance. Most of the early DD systems provided uniform lateral dose profiles
by using different devices, mainly patient-specific, placed in the beam line to
shape the three-dimensional final target dose. More recently, systems that
provide highly conformal dose distributions using thousands of narrow beams at
well-defined energy were developed which feature advanced scanning magnets and
real-time beam monitors, without patient-specific hardware. This lecture will
cover the general dose delivery concept as well as the different DD
instrumentations depending mainly on the beam delivery technique and on the
particle and accelerator types. Some characteristic worldwide DD and beam
monitor systems will be mentioned.Comment: presented at the CAS- CERN Accelerator School on Accelerators for
Medical Application, V\"osendorf, Austria, 26 May - 5 June, 201