Real-time monitoring and diagnosis of scintillation dosimeters using an ultraviolet light emitting diode

Plastic scintillator fibre optic dosimeters (FODs) have advantages for both brachytherapy and external beam radiotherapy applications. Convenient real-time monitoring and diagnosis of such dosimeters are desirable because of changes in the optical circuit that may arise in use. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a real-time method using ultraviolet light emitting diodes (LED) to stimulate the scintillator and to diagnose failures of FODs. Key aspects of the LED FOD dosimetry design are investigated, enabling the design of a stable and accurate real-time monitoring dosimetry system. We demonstrate experimentally that the real-time monitoring FOD system is convenient to be used to monitor FOD dosimeters and to diagnose their failures resulted from different mechanisms.