Abstract
Fiber dosimeters have recently drawn much interest for measuring in vivo and in real time the dose of medical radiations. This paper presents the first miniaturized fiber dosimeter integrated at the end of a narrow 125 μm outer diameter optical fiber. Miniaturization is rendered possible by exploiting the concept of a leaky wave optical antenna for interfacing the scintillators and the fiber and by taking advantage of the low propagation loss of narrow silica fibers and high detection yield of single-pixel photon counters. Upon irradiation at 6 MV in air, our fiber probe leads to a linear detection response with a signal-to-noise ratio as high as 195. Although implemented with inorganic scintillators and fiber, our miniaturized fiber probe induces minimum screening effects on ionizing radiations over a negligible area (0.153 mm2). Our nano-optically driven approach may thus result in ultra-compact fiber dosimeters of negligible footprint in the radiotherapeutic processes, even with non-water equivalent fibers and scintillators. This opens new opportunities for a large panel of therapies relying on ionizing radiations (photons or charged particles).
Highlights
Recent advances in radiation therapies have prompted the need for tools to accurately probe ionizing radiations at small scales, in confined environments, in real time and with compact invisible devices
We demonstrated the first miniaturized fiber dosimeter integrated at the end of a narrow 125 μm outer diameter optical fiber
We demonstrated a miniaturized fiber probe for locally measuring in real-time the dose of medical radiations
Summary
Recent advances in radiation therapies have prompted the need for tools to accurately probe ionizing radiations at small scales, in confined environments, in real time and with compact invisible devices. Filtering out the Cerenkov signal is possible at the expense of a critical broadening of the probe in the context of intracorporeal dosimetry (paired-fiber configuration) [3, 19, 21] Scaling down this on-fiber technology by approximately one order of magnitude, to make it integrated at the end of a narrow optical fiber of about the size of a human hair (80-125 μm), would provide new opportunities in the detection of ionizing radiations. The horn nano-optical antenna has been proposed to transfer the emission of a point-like dipole source into an optical fiber [24] This antenna has been successfully used to interface a scintillating cluster to a single-mode optical fiber, thereby leading to a micron size X-ray fiber probe [25]. The use of narrow fibers offers other advantages such as lower propagation loss than plastic fibers and the use of mono-pixel photon counters which develop higher detection yield than the multi-pixel systems used with plastic fibers
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