Characterization of a Ce3+ doped SiO2 optical dosimeter for dose measurements in HDR brachytherapy

Aim of this work was to study the application of a new miniaturized Ce3+ doped SiO2 scintillation detector to in vivo dosimetry in high dose rate brachytherapy. Energy, dose-rate, temperature and angular dependences of the detector response to 192Ir HDR brachytherapy fields were investigated, as well as sensitivity reproducibility and linearity. To this aim, two ad hoc phantoms were designed and developed to perform measurements in water. Intra-session reproducibility resulted to be very high, however intersession reproducibility showed too high statistical variation. Detector response resulted to increase linearly with dose (R2 = 0.997), with no evidence of energy and dose-rate dependence. Sensitivity resulted to increase linearly with temperature (R2 = 0.995), with a 0.2% increase each degree. Finally, no significant angular dependence for the source moving around a circle in the azimuthal plane centered at the scintillator was observed. The obtained results show that the proposed detector is suitable for in vivo real-time dosimetry in high dose rate brachytherapy.