Characteristics of the Exradin W1 scintillator in the magnetic field

J Appl Clin Med Phys. 2019 Sep;20(9):149-156. doi: 10.1002/acm2.12707. Epub 2019 Aug 28.

Abstract

To investigate the angular dependency of the W1 scintillator with and without a magnetic field, the beam incidence angles to the detector varied from 0° to 360° at intervals of 30° when the detector was pointed in both the craniocaudal and right-to-left directions. The beam incidence angles also varied from 0° to 360° at intervals of 45° when the W1 scintillator was in the anterior-to-posterior direction. To investigate the field size dependency of the W1 scintillator with and without a magnetic field, the doses by an identical beam-on time were measured at various square field sizes and the measured doses were normalized to the dose at the field of 10.5 cm × 10.5 cm (FS10.5). With and without a magnetic field, the deviations of the doses to the dose at the beam incident angle of 0° were always less than 1% regardless of the dosimeter positioning relative to the magnetic field direction. When the field sizes were equal to or less than FS10.5, the differences in the output factors with and without a magnetic field were less than 0.7%. However, those were larger than 1% at fields larger than FS10.5, and up to 3.1%. The W1 scintillator showed no angular dependency to the magnetic field. Differences larger than 1% in the output factors with and without a magnetic field were observed at field sizes larger than 10.5 cm × 10.5 cm.

Keywords: angular dependency; magnetic resonance image-guided radiation therapy; output factor; plastic scintillation detector.

MeSH terms

  • Humans
  • Magnetic Fields
  • Monte Carlo Method*
  • Particle Accelerators / instrumentation*
  • Phantoms, Imaging*
  • Photons*
  • Scintillation Counting / instrumentation*