A high-resolution large-area detector for quality assurance in radiotherapy

Hadron therapy is an advanced radiation modality for treating cancer, which currently uses protons and carbon ions. Hadrons allow for a highly conformal dose distribution to the tumour, minimising the detrimental side-effects due to radiation received by healthy tissues. Treatment with hadrons requires sub-millimetre spatial resolution and high dosimetric accuracy. This paper discusses the design, fabrication and performance tests of a detector based on Gas Electron Multipliers (GEM) coupled to a matrix of thin-film transistors (TFT), with an active area of 60 × 80 mm² and 200 ppi resolution. The experimental results show that this novel detector is able to detect low-energy (40 kVp X-rays), high-energy (6 MeV) photons used in conventional radiation therapy and protons and carbon ions of clinical energies used in hadron therapy. The GEM-TFT is a compact, fully scalable, radiation-hard detector that measures secondary electrons produced by the GEMs with sub-millimetre spatial resolution and a linear response for proton currents from 18 pA to 0.7 nA. Correcting known detector defects may aid in future studies on dose uniformity, LET dependence, and different gas mixture evaluation, improving the accuracy of QA in radiotherapy.