The essential component of modern radiation therapy is the application of steep dose gradients during patient treatment in order to maximize the radiation dose to the target volume and protect neighboring heathy tissues. However, volumetric dose distribution in an irradiated target is still a bottleneck of dose verification in modern radiotherapy. Dose gels are almost the only known dosimetry tool which allows for the evaluation of dose distribution in the irradiated volume due to gel's polymerization upon irradiation. The accuracy of dose gel dosimetry has its own obstacle, which is related to the continuation of the gel's polymerization after the radiation treatment procedure is finished. In this article, a method to monitor the polymerization dynamics of dose gels in real-time is proposed using a modified optical spectrometry system. Using the proposed method, the changes of the optical characteristics of irradiated nMAG dose gels in situ were assessed. The investigation revealed that the detectable polymerization in dose gel proceeds up to 6 h after irradiation. This time is significantly shorter compared with a commonly recommended 24 h waiting time allocated for polymer gel to settle. It was also found that dose rate significantly influences the temporal response of the nMAG dosimeter. By increasing the irradiation dose rate by a factor of 2, the time needed for the polymerization process to settle was increased by 22%. Identification of the gel's post-irradiation polymerization time interval and its dependence on irradiation parameters will contribute to more accurate dose verification using dose gel dosimetry.
Keywords: QA; X-ray irradiation; gel dosimetry; photospectrometry; polymerization dynamics.