Marc-Antoine Leclerc

Brachytherapy is a cancer treatment where photon-emitting radiation sources are placed inside or near a patient’s tumour. The sources emit photon radiation with rotational symmetry, which results in radiation dose spillage to surrounding healthy tissues. A new treatment called “diffusing alpha-emitters radiotherapy” (DaRT) will use alpha-particle emitters instead, which have a shorter range and will limit the radiation on healthy tissues. However, no detector can adequately characterize the radiation sources to ensure quality assurance of the treatment. These radiation sources are embedded in seeds that are administrated using different-sized applicators. This project aims to build a prototype detector capable of obtaining information such as the total amount of radiation of the source, the number of seeds inside each source and the activity per seed. This information will be benchmarked with the information provided by the vendor.