Recent developments in scintillating fiber detection systems in radiation therapy

Sophisticated radiotherapy techniques lead to more conformal dose distributions but increase treatment complexity. Image guidance allows for varying degrees of accuracy in patient set-up. However, the consequences of inaccurate set-up and/or patient motion during treatment become more serious when treatment doses are increased and treatment margins are decreased. Thus, the need to know if the dose has been delivered as planned has driven the development of plastic scintillation detector systems for accurate measurements in real time with high spatial resolution. We have developed a clinical prototype comprising 29 scintillating fiber detectors 1 mm in diameter and 2 mm in length. The detectors are coupled to clear optical fibers that collect the scintillation photons and transport them to a CCD for detection. Open field profiles and depth-dose profiles in water-equivalent phantoms were compared to ionization chamber measurements in water. The maximum relative in-field difference was 1.6%. With a standard deviation for in-field measurements smaller than 1%, this prototype array was found to be accurate, precise and practical. Monte Carlo simulations were also used to evaluate the response of the scintillation detector to proton beams and to optimize the light collection efficiency. The Monte Carlo code Geant4 was used to simulate dose deposition, the production of scintillation photons and the propagation of those photons inside the scintillation detector. Further development of the system will allow thousands of measurement points distributed in a three-dimensional volume per single irradiation, therefore producing a rapid evaluation of complex dose distributions emanating from these new complex treatment modalities.