Radiation Monitoring with a Dosimeter Conformal to the Human Body

Radiation is used extensively in healthcare both for establishing diagnostics and as a powerful treatment tool. From visualizing features within bones, tissues, and organs to treating cancer, the radiation dose and point of contact to the human body are tailored to each patient’s needs. Administration of the correct dose is critical to the outcome of the procedure, and precise control of its path prevents serious damage that the ionizing radiation can induce to the healthy tissues surrounding the target volumes. Conventional dosimetry techniques used in clinical settings, however, are limited to providing only the absolute radiation dose a patient receives, and accurately measuring variations in its value over large areas remains a challenge. In this presentation I will discuss radiation detectors based on large area arrays of organic field-effect transistors (RAD-OFETs) that allow for high-resolution <i>in vivo</i> dosimetry at the skin surface. These dosimeters absorb radiation similar to the tissue, are low-cost, mechanically flexible and conformal to the human body, allowing for direct measurement of the radiation dose without the need for extensive data processing faced by current technologies. The mechanism responsible for radiation detection, as well as the sensitivity of the devices, are discussed. 2D-mapping the spatial distribution of the dose revealed non-uniformities in the received dose, with hotspots near the center beam. Our results are important because they provide the much-needed tools that can generate the information on the variations in the radiation dose over a large area, relevant to diagnostics and therapy in a clinical setting. The spatial control over the administered dose would allow for maximizing the target dose, while minimizing normal tissue dose when planning a patient’s radiation regimen.<br/><br/>This work has been performed in collaboration with Derek Dremann, Dr. Andrew Zeidell, Prof. James D. Ververs, Prof. J. Daniel Bourland, and Prof. John E. Anthony.