Illuminating the future of radiotherapy: 3D printed scintillation detectors

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Plastic scintillators are near-ideal radiation detectors. They produce light when exposed to radiation, and the light can be collected with an optical reader. Their use is common in radiation therapy and particle physics for high energy x-ray or particle detections. To date, these detectors have not reached their full potential partly because of the limitations in shape and design. Plastic scintillators are available commercially in standard forms such as slabs, cubes, cylinders, spheres, or fibres. Production of good quality scintillators is a time-consuming process that requires specialized expertise, space, and equipment. Typically, a user would have to apply the scintillators as purchased. If customized shapes or light-output characteristics are desired, the purchase could be prohibitively costly.  Recent advances in 3D printing technology have resulted in producing a myriad of relatively low-cost consumer-grade printers. 3D printing is ideal for the rapid manufacturing of unique end products or small batches of products with bespoke or complex geometries. The users can rapidly create complex shapes that would otherwise be difficult, costly, and time-consuming to produce by traditional techniques. We aim to apply accessible 3D printing solutions to delivering high-quality and affordable plastic scintillators with custom-designed shape and light-output characteristics. Our immediate application is to use plastic scintillators for reading patients' radiation dose during radiation therapy treatments, the so-called in-vivo dose. Radiation therapy treatments are carefully planned, checked, and verified before the patient comes to the clinic. Still, once the treatment begins, there is most often no direct monitoring of the patient's radiation dose, which can be variable with the patient position, anatomical change, or inadvertent deviations in the treatment unit's performance. We want to integrate 3D printed scintillators into 3D printed devices worn by patients during treatments and read the light produced by radiation. Such routine in-vivo measurements would prevent accidents in radiation therapy, ensure that the intended dose is delivered, and, over time, serve to provide clinicians with invaluable information about the relationships between the outcomes and actual doses. The research and development in this project are also highly valuable in other fields besides medicine. This new technique could open up new possibilities for the field of particle detection. A successful 3D-printed plastic scintillator detector could pave the way for broader use of this technology in detector building, which could shake up the field of high-energy physics where large-scale custom-designed detectors have been prohibitively expensive for most applications. Such accessible large-scale and custom-designed detectors have immediate applications in detection of neutrinos.