Particle detector applications in medicine

Abstract

Selected particle detectors are described which find an application in medicine and have been the topic of presentations at the 2013 Vienna Conference of Instrumentation (VCI).

Novel scintillation detector design and performance for proton radiography and computed tomography

“…(b) WEPL resolution averaged over 260 mm proton range as function of the intrinsic detector energy resolution δ E for the three detector design approaches: calorimeter (n = 1), multistage energy/range detectors (n = 3, 5, 80), and range counter (n = 60). shows its dependence on the energy measurement uncertainty δE for the detectors with different number of identical stagesa single-stage calorimeter with δE 1% resolution, 6 range counter with 60 plates of 4 mm thickness, 7 and multistage detectors with three, 6 five (this work), and eighty stages. 9 The protons are assumed to have a kinetic energy of 200 MeV, such that R tot 260 mm.…”

“…Equation (4) indicates that to achieve performance close to the theoretical limit of range straggling, a calorimeter WEPL detector should provide an energy resolution better than 1% from a few tens of MeV to a few hundreds of MeV, a performance level that is not easy to achieve, especially with a fast detector. 6 An alternative approach to measuring WEPL is to build a detector with a large number of stages of a few mm in thickness (n ≫ 10, i.e., a true range counter), as described, e.g., in Refs. 7 and 8.…”

“…Using approximate Eqs. (4), (6), and (8) for the detectors comprised of different number of stages, we estimated the intrinsic resolution δE required to keep the WEPL measurement uncertainty per 200 MeV proton close to the 2.85 mm proton straggling limit and not exceeding 3 mm. The δE values and corresponding WEPL resolution averaged over 0-260 mm WEPL range are presented in Table I. The multistage approach has clear advantages over the range-counter approach, i.e., better WEPL resolution, simpler assembly, and a greatly reduced number of channels, meaning lower cost and less readout complexity.…”