The thermoluminescence response of Ge-doped silica fibres for synchrotron microbeam radiation therapy dosimetry

In radiation cancer therapy, the aim is to destroy the tumour cells in the treated area while minimizing damage to the surrounding normal tissue. Synchrotron microbeam radiation therapy offers considerable promise in this respect, based on knowledge that normal tissue can tolerate high doses of radiation over small volumes. At the ESRF microbeam radiation therapy facility, one of the several aspects being investigated is measurement of very high dose gradients (changing by hundreds of Gy over ∼10 μm), as there is no established physical dosimetric system simultaneously providing accurate measurements of the doses in the microbeam peaks and valleys. Monte Carlo simulations have been obtained but these have yet to be validated by measurements. One possible means of obtaining micro dosimetric evaluations is use of the thermoluminescence (TL) produced by optical fibres. Previous studies at conventional electron linac radiotherapy facilities have shown that germanium-doped silica fibres offer useful sensitivity to radiotherapy doses it is being further established that commercially produced Ge-doped optical fibres can provide a TL-yield reproducibility of better than 4% (1 SD). Present experiments have investigated the thermoluminescence response of such fibres at incident energies of several tens of keV, for a wide range of doses, from 1 Gy to 10 kGy, revealing a linear correlation of r2≥0.998 up to a dose of 2 kGy, encompassing the dosimetric needs of both conventional and synchrotron microbeam radiotherapy.