GafChromic® film measurements for Microbeam Radiation Therapy (MRT)

Microbeam Radiation Therapy (MRT) is a preclinical synchrotron radiation based therapy technique in its preclinical stage with the potential to treat brain tumours in children when other kinds of radiotherapy would be excessively toxic to the developing normal brain. The most promising feature of MRT lies in its unusual resistance of MRT irradiated tissues to radioneurotoxicity even for peak doses of several hundreds of Gray. Results obtained with the spatially fractionated beams indicate a superior therapeutic effect compared to conventional radiotherapy. MRT, solely possible at SR sources with negligible beam divergence, is profiting from the dose volume effect and most probably from some differences in the tumour and the normal tissue responses, yet to be fully understood. This paper demonstrates that dosimetric measurements requiring a spatial resolution of a few microns is feasible with the use of GafChromic® films together with a high resolution scanner system. The data so obtained can be used to benchmark Monte Carlo calculations. © 2009 Springer-Verlag.