Program Information
Experimental Investigation of the Energy Dependence of TLD Sensitivity in Low-Energy Photon Beams
Z Chen and R Nath, Yale Univ School of Medicine, New Haven, CT
Presentations
SU-F-19A-6 Sunday 4:00PM - 6:00PM Room: 19APurpose: To measure the energy dependence of TLD sensitivity in low-energy photon beams with equivalent mono-energetic energy matching those of 103Pd, 125I and 131Cs brachytherapy sources.
Methods: A Pantek DXT 300 x-ray unit (Precision X-ray, Branford, CT), with stable digital voltage control down to 20 kV, was used to establish three low-energy photon beams with narrow energy spread and equivalent mono-energetic energies matching those of 103Pd, 125I and 131Cs brachytherapy sources. The low-energy x-ray beams and a reference 6 MV photon beam were calibrated according to the AAPM TG-61 and TG-51 protocols, respectively, using a parallel-plate low-energy chamber and a Farmer cylindrical chamber with NIST traceable calibration factors. The dose response of model TLD-100 micro-cubes (1x1x1 mm³) in each beam was measured for five different batches of TLDs (each contained approximately 100 TLDs) that have different histories of irradiation and usage. Relative absorbed dose sensitivity was determined as the quotient of the slope of dose response for a beam-of-interest to that of the reference beam.
Results: Equivalent mono-energetic photon energies of the low-energy beams established for 103Pd, 125I and 131Cs sources were 20.5, 27.5, and 30.1 keV, respectively. Each beam exhibited narrow spectral spread with energy-homogeneity index close to 90%. The relative absorbed-dose sensitivity was found to vary between different batches of TLD with maximum differences of up to 8%. The mean and standard deviation determined from the five TLD batches was 1.453 ± 0.026, 1.541 ± 0.035 and 1.529 ± 0.051 for the simulated 103P, 125I and 131Cs beams, respectively.
Conclusion: Our measured relative absorbed-dose sensitivities are greater than the historically measured value of 1.41. We find that the relative absorbed-dose sensitivity of TLD in the 103P beam is approximately 5% lower than that of 125I and 131Cs beams. Comparison of our results with other studies will be presented.
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