Graduate Investigator: Reed Kolany

 

Summary of Research: The growing use of commercial plastic scintillation detectors (PSDs) in radiation therapy has increased the need for characterization in a variety of environments. Since the seminal papers by Beddar et al., the use of PSDs in a clinical environment has grown due to favorable characteristics they hold such as water-equivalence, live read-out, small size, flat energy response and dose rate, and high sensitivity. The need for additional in vivo dosimetry beyond the use thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLDs) has additionally increased the desirability for commercial PSD systems. The goal of this project is the characterize the thermal dependence of a commercially available PSD system and to investigate the differences between the thermal dependencies in a photon beam vs. an electron beam.