Design and Verification of Fluorescence Detector for Rapidly Acquiring the Bragg Peak Position of Carbon Ion Beam

A design scheme of fluorescence detector was proposed for rapidly acquiring the Bragg peak position of carbon ion beam in scintillator material. Based on the characteristic of scintillator emitting fluorescence under the irradiation of carbon ion beam, CMOS camera is applied to acquire the image of fluorescent intensity distribution on the side of a thin scintillator, and then the Bragg peak position of carbon ion beam in the scintillator material is quickly obtained by analyzing the fluorescent image. According to the scheme, a fluorescence detector was developed and then used for experimental measurement under the irradiation of carbon-ion uniform fields and pencil beams with different energies. The experimental results showed that the Bragg peak position of the carbon ion beams could be clearly observed from the fluorescent image obtained by the detector. Moreover, the method of Monte Carlo simulation was used to calculate the depth dose distribution of carbon ion beams under the experimental conditions mentioned above. It was found that there was a penetration depth difference between the measured and calculated Bragg peak positions of carbon ion beam in the scintillator material by the fluorescence detector and the Monte Carlo simulation due to the difference between their settings, but the differences under the various irradiation conditions were nearly the same. Therefore, the experimental measurements and Monte Carlo simulations verified that the fluorescence detector scheme could be used for quickly acquiring the Bragg peak position of carbon ion beam in the scintillator material definitely, which provides a substantial basis for establishing a fast fluorescence detector-based quality assurance measurement method in carbon ion radiotherapy.