Mass manufacturable scintillation-based optical fiber dosimeters for brachytherapy
Jürgen Van Erps, Agnieszka Gierej, Tigran H. Baghdasaryan, Michael Martyn, Peter Woulfe, Owen McLaughlin, Kevin M. Prise, Geraldine Workman, Sinéad O’Keeffe, Kurt Rochlitz, Sergey Verlinski, A. Giaz, R. Santoro, M. Caccia, Francis Berghmans
Papers open inside SciRah from the original publisher or repository; SciRah never hosts them.
Abstract
Scintillation-based fiber dosimeters are a powerful tool for minimally invasive localized real-time monitoring of the dose rate during brachytherapy (BT). We present a fabrication method for mass manufacturing of scintillating sensor tips which are to be attached to polymer optical fiber (POF) to enable fiber-optic dosimetry. The scintillating sensor tips consist of inorganic scintillators, dispersed in a polymer host. The manufacturing is done by means of a custom compression and transfer moulding process implemented on a commercially available hot embossing machine. We show the manufacturing of 237 sensor tips, which are subsequently attached to the end of the POF using UV-curable adhesive. Finally, we perform dosimetry experiments in water phantoms which show a great potential for in-vivo dosimetry for brachytherapy, both for Low Dose Rate (LDR) and High Dose Rate (HDR) BT.