Improving analysis of radiochromic films

Abstract

An appropriate radiochromic film should respond uniformly throughout its surface after exposure to a uniform radiation field. The evaluation of radiochromic films may be carried out, for example, by measuring color intensities in film-based digitized images. Fluctuations in color intensity may be caused by many different factors such as optical structure of the film's active layer, defects in structure of the film, scratches and external agents, such as dust. The use of high spatial resolution during film scanning should also increase microscopic uniformity. Since the average is strongly influenced by extreme values, the use of other statistical tools, for which this problem becomes inconspicuous, optimizes the application of higher spatial resolution as well as reduces standard deviations. This paper compares the calibration curves of the XR-QA2 Gafchromic® radiochromic film based on three different methods: the average of all color intensity readings, the median of these same readings and the average of readings that fall between the first and third quartiles. Results indicate that a higher spatial resolution may be adopted whenever the calibration curve is based on tools less influenced by extreme values such as those generated by the factors mentioned above.