Assessment of a Therapeutic X-ray Radiation Dose Measurement System Based on a Flexible Copper Indium Gallium Selenide Solar Cell

Abstract

Several detectors have been developed to measure radiation doses during radiotherapy. However, most detectors are not flexible. Consequently, the airgaps between the patient surface and detector could reduce the measurement accuracy. Thus, this study proposes a dose measurement system based on a flexible copper indium gallium selenide (CIGS) solar cell. Our system comprises a customized CIGS solar cell (with a size 10 × 10 cm2 and thickness 0.33 mm), voltage amplifier, data acquisition module, and laptop with in-house software. In the study, the dosimetric characteristics, such as dose linearity, dose rate independence, energy independence, and field size output, of the dose measurement system in therapeutic X-ray radiation were quantified. For dose linearity, the slope of the linear fitted curve and the R-square value were 1.00 and 0.9999, respectively. The differences in the measured signals according to changes in the dose rates and photon energies were <2% and <3%, respectively. The field size output measured using our system exhibited a substantial increase as the field size increased, contrary to that measured using the ion chamber/film. Our findings demonstrate that our system has good dosimetric characteristics as a flexible in vivo dosimeter. Furthermore, the size and shape of the solar cell can be easily customized, which is an advantage over other flexible dosimeters based on an a-Si solar cell.