Medical Physics Seminar - Monday, April 14, 2008

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Scintillation Dosimetry:  Review, New Innovations & Applications

Sam Beddar, Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Department of Radiation Physics

The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center

Houston, Texas

Interest in the development of plastic scintillation detector systems for dosimetry has been evolving for more than a decade (Beddar et al. 1992a,b,c; de Boer et al. 1993; Fluhs et al. 1996; Fontbonne et al. 2002 ; Beddar et al. 2003, Archambault et al. 2006). Plastic scintillation materials have many properties that make them ideal for dosimetry including water equivalence and energy independence for MV photons, linearity with dose, dose rate independence, and high spatial resolution. The only disadvantage of plastic scintillation detectors is the spurious effect arising from Cerenkov radiation produced in the optical fiber that guides the scintillation light. This evolution started with point detectors and is leading to matrix arrays to respond to the ever-increasing complexity of radiotherapy treatment fields such as IMRT.  Small fields, high dose gradients and other challenging conditions could soon require the development of commercial scintillation detectors. Moreover, using photodetector with a large sensitive area (e.g. a CCD camera), arrays of several hundreds of scintillation detectors could be made to simplify long and arduous quality assurance tests.

Location: 1335 Health Sciences Learning Center (HSLC)

Time:  4:00pm-5:00pm

Refreshments will be provided prior to the talk

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