Calorimetric approach for 3D dosimetry of high intensity therapeutic electron beams

The technique of High Dose Rate Intra-Operative Radiation Therapy (HDR-IORT) consists in the delivery of irradiation immediately after the removal of a cancerous mass, where the same incision is used to focalize the radiation to the tumour bed. Given its particular characteristics, IORT requires dose measurements that are different from those requested in external radiotherapy treatments. The main reason lies in the fact that in this case a single high dose must be delivered to a target volume whose extension and depth will be determined directly during the operation. Because of this peculiar characteristics, until now there is not a dosimetric system able to detect the electron beam giving at once a realtime response and an extensive spatial measure of the absorbed dose. Within the framework of a research project of the INFN (Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics), we proposed a new system to overcome the problems, Dosiort. The final set-up is a solid phantom having a density approximately 1 g/cm3 with sensitive layers of scintillating fibres at fixed positions in a calorimetric configuration for the containment of electrons of energy 4-12 MeV. The prototype will be able to define the physical and geometrical characteristics of the electron beam (energy, isotropy, homogeneity, etc) and to measure the parameters needed to select the energy, the intensity and the Monitor Units (MU) for the exposition: percentage Depth Dose; beam profiles; isodose curves; values of dose per MU. In this work we present the results obtained by using two orthogonal layers of the calorimetric phantom Dosiort, in particular we report the measurement of the dynamic range of the read-out system and the first qualitative study of the results which can be extracted from the measurements taken in a test beam.