The ongoing development of easily accessible, fast optical readout tools promises to remove one of the barriers to acceptance of gel dosimetry as a viable tool in cancer clinics. This paper describes the characterization of a number of basic properties of the Vista cone beam CCD-based optical scanner, which can obtain high resolution reconstructed data in less than 20 min total imaging and reconstruction time. The suitability of a filtered back projection cone beam reconstruction algorithm is established for optically absorbing dosimeters using this scanner configuration. The system was then shown to be capable of imaging an optically absorbing media-filled 1 L polyethylene terephthalate (PETE) jar dosimeter to a reconstructed voxel resolution of 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 mm(3). At this resolution, more than 60% of the imaged volume in the dosimeter exhibits minimal spatial distortion, a measurement accuracy of 3-4% and the mean to standard deviation signal-to-noise ratio greater than 100 over an optical absorption range of 0.06-0.18 cm(-1). An inter-day scan precision of 1% was demonstrated near the upper end of this range. Absorption measurements show evidence of stray light perturbation causing artifacts in the data, which if better managed would improve the accuracy of optical readout. Cone beam optical attenuation measurements of scattering dosimeters, on the other hand, are nonlinearly affected by angled scatter stray light. Scatter perturbation leads to significant cupping artifacts and other inaccuracies that greatly limit the readout of scattering polymer gel dosimeters with cone beam optical CT.

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This study reports on efforts to increase the dose sensitivity of polymer gel dosimeters used in 3D radiation dosimetry. The potential of several different cosolvents is investigated, with the aim of increasing the solubility of N,N'-methylene-bisacrylamide crosslinker in polymer gel dosimeters. Glycerol and isopropanol increase the limit for the crosslinker solubility from approximately 3% to 5% and 10% by weight, respectively. This enables the manufacture of polymer gel dosimeters with much higher levels of crosslinking than was previously possible. New dosimeter recipes containing up to 5 wt% N,N'-methylene-bisacrylamide were subjected to spatially uniform radiation and were studied using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), as well as x-ray and optical CT techniques. The resulting dosimeters exhibit dose sensitivities that are up to 2.7 times higher than measured for a typical dosimeters with 3% N,N'-methylene-bisacrylamide without the addition of cosolvent. Two additional cosolvents (n-propanol and sec-butanol) were deemed unsuitable for practical dosimeters due to incompatibility with gelatin, cloudiness prior to irradiation, and immiscibility with water when large quantities of cosolvent were used. The dosimeters with high N,N'-methylene-bisacrylamide content that used isopropanol or glycerol as cosolvents had high optical clarity prior to irradiation, but did not produce suitable optical CT results for non-uniformly irradiated gels due to polymer development outside of the high dose regions of the pencil beams and significant light scatter. Further experiments are required to determine whether cosolvents can be used to manufacture gels with sufficiently high dose sensitivity for readout using x-ray computed tomography.

This work develops imaging protocols for improved dose readout of a Fricke-xylenol orange-gelatin (FXG) gel-filled 1 L polyethylene terephthalate (PETE) jar dosimeter using a commercial Vista(TM) cone-beam optical computed tomography (CT) scanner from Modus Medical Devices Inc. (London, ON, Canada). To ensure good management of light source-detector stability, it was determined that (a) a minimum of 2 h warm-up time is necessary prior to dosimeter scanning, (b) the light source should be kept on until the completion of the last data scan except for the minimum amount of time required to acquire dark field images, and (c) the optional Vista software projection image normalization routine should be used in image reconstruction. The institution of dosimeter scan time and temperature control was strongly indicated from the experiments. A standard post-irradiation wait time of 30 min measured to within ±30 s was established to minimize the measurement uncertainties due to dosimeter development and diffusion. To alleviate thermochromic behavior leading to inaccurate dose readout, holding bath warm up and pre-scan temperature adjustment procedures were developed to control dosimeter temperature to within ±0.2 °C. The possibility of stray light minimizing protocols was also investigated and deemed to be unnecessary. The largest significant sources of stray light in the system were identified as being due to angled scatter from the dosimeter gelatin matrix and refraction from the jar wall interfaces. It was concluded that these phenomena would be better addressed through dosimeter modification and an inter-jar dose-to-attenuation calibration methodology, rather than by setting additional imaging protocols.

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