| The polymer gel dosimeter made its debut in the early 90's and dosimetrists and medical physicists alike were excited about the prospect of using the gel dosimeter as an effective and useful three-dimensional modeling tool. Research in the early to mid-90's brought on better polymer mixtures with greater sensitivity and shelf life. Nearly a decade later, these gels are not being used in a clinical setting. The question is, why are they not being routinely used in the clinical setting for modeling and quality assurance of radiation instrumentation and computer generated treatment plans? There are three main reasons and we address these reasons directly in this investigation. First, every promising experiment performed on these gels were done in ideal conditions. The problem ideal experimentation is that the conditions in a clinical setting are unpredictable hence these idealized protocols could not be easily used in practice. Second, attempts to use the gels in clinical settings had mixed results. There was no real consistency with the results based on calibration curves generated by the gel manufacturer and even based on additional calibration studies performed by the medical physicists. Third, there were no consistent and effective calculation programs that were flexible, rigorous, and consistent to use.; Due to these main problems, medical physicists have begun to dismiss the gel dosimeter and reverted to traditional 1-dimensional and 2-dimensional verification methods. What we developed in this study is a means to put the polymer gel dosimeter back into the forefront of dosimetry. First, we performed experiments under a clinical setting. Then, we investigated three different calibration methods, including our very own normalized calibration protocol to identify calibration problems and offer up a solution to this problem. Finally, we also generated a good data processing program that is flexible, rigorous, and consistent to use in any setting. In addition to these investigations, we also performed additional quality assurance investigations by testing the accuracy of the traditional treatment and planning systems versus the newer treatment planning and irradiation systems. The results of all of our investigations prove that the polymer gel dosimeter can be effectively used as long as the calibration is consistent and the data processing programs are accurate and flexible. |
