Beta planar source quality assurance with the Fricke xylenol gel dosimeter

Beta therapy is employed in post surgery to treat lesions such as pterygia, keloid and glioblastoma. The beta source most used for these purposes is 90/90Y, whose quality assurance is a challenge, because the detectors currently used for this evaluation do not satisfy the spatial resolution, the effective atomic number and the tissue equivalent conditions. The Fricke xylenol gel (FXG) has been used in several applications in radiotherapy due to its better characteristics. This dosimeter is associated with the Fe(II) to Fe(III) oxidation, post ionizing irradiation, being the final Fe(III) concentration linearly depended on the absorbed dose. The goal of this present work is to show that the FXG, with atomic effective number (Zeff) of 7.75 and high resolution (<1 mm), accomplishes quality assurance for rectangular and square planar 90Sr/90Y sources. In order to demonstrate the quality assurance, calibration curves, percentage depth dose and beam profile from exposed FXG samples were analyzed and from these results, we demonstrate the potential use of the FXG dosimeter for beta source quality control.