Development of a quality assurance phantom for brachytherapy: the feasibility of daily check with the phantom

Objective: We developed a quality assurance (QA) phantom to enable easy confirmation of radiation source output measurements of a high dose rate (192)Ir intracavitary brachytherapy unit in gynecology. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the feasibility of daily checks using the QA phantom.

Methods: The QA phantom was designed with tough water phantoms to hold a Farmer-type ionization chamber, with semiconductor detectors used as in vivo dosimeters to measure rectal dose, and three transfer tubes for gynecology. To test the reliability of our QA phantom for the detection of abnormalities in source output or semiconductor detectors, we applied different doses.

Results: Variations due to different settings of the QA phantom were within 2%. The temporal variations were less than 2% and 5% in the Farmer-type ionization chamber and semiconductor detectors, respectively. Interobserver variations were below 3%.

Conclusions: With tolerance levels of 2% and 5% for a Farmer-type ionization chamber and semiconductor detectors, respectively, a QA phantom is potentially useful for easily detecting abnormalities by applying daily checks of the brachytherapy unit.