Preliminary evaluation of optical CT scanning versus MRI for nPAG gel dosimetry: The Ghent experience

The aim of this study was to evaluate fast laser-scanning optical CT versus MRI for an nPAG gel dosimeter in terms of accuracy and precision. Three small cylindrical volumetric gel phantoms were fabricated and irradiated with photon beams. The gel dosimeters were scanned with an MR scanner and an in house developed laser scanning optical CT scanner. A comparison between MRI and optical CT scanning was performed based on the reconstructed images. Preliminary results show a fair correspondence in the MRI acquired and optical CT acquired dose maps. Still, ringing artifacts contaminate the reconstructed optical CT images. These may be related to sub-pixel misalignments between the blank projection and the acquired transmission projection of the gel phantom. Another artifact may be caused by refraction near the edges of the field. Further optimisation of our optical CT scanner is required to obtain the same accuracy as with MRI. To make a comparison between the two imaging modalities in terms of precision, the intrinsic dose precision on readout (IP_D) was calculated which is independent of spatial resolution and acquisition time. It is shown that optical CT has a better intrinsic dose precision.