Use of a CMOS Image Sensor for an Active Personal Dosimeter in Interventional Radiology

Abstract

Interventional radiologists and staff members, during all their professional activities, are frequently exposed to protracted and fractionated low doses of ionizing radiation. Due to skin tissues and peripheral blood irradiation, these exposures can result in deterministic effects (radiodermatitis, aged skin, and hand depilation) or stochastic ones (skin and non-solid cancer incidence). The authors present a novel approach to perform online monitoring of the staff during their interventions by using a device based on an Active Pixel Sensor. The performance of the sensor as an X-ray radiation detector has been evaluated with a proper experimental setup: the number of photons and the generated charge have been assessed as dosimetric observables from the frames acquired by the sensor using a two-threshold clustering algorithm, the efficiency of which has been evaluated as well. The correlation of these observables with passive dosimeter dose measurements has been analyzed: a good linearity has been demonstrated, and the response difference between pulsed and continuous operational modes is reduced to less than 10%, marking a distinct improvement with respect to commercial Active Personal Dosimeters.Index Terms-Active Personal Dosimeter, CMOS pixels, dosimetry, interventional radiology (IR), X-ray.

Personal Dosimetry in Direct Pulsed Photon Fields With the Dosepix Detector

“…A comprehensive overview of radiation dosemeter types is given in [10]. Alternative active personal dosemeter systems in IR consist of CMOS image sensors as presented in [11], [12]. In this work, the detector type of interest are hybrid photon-counting pixel detectors.…”

Human Body-Related Disease Diagnosis Systems Using CMOS Image Sensors: A Systematic Review

“…These exposures can cause effects like aged skin, hand depilation, and radiodermatitis or may cause skin cancer. Elia Conti et al [ 30 ] focused on one of these possible applications in Interventional Radiology (IR), a device to perform online monitoring of all the people involving in interventional activities. This portable device can measure the accumulated dose in real time and have an alarm to reduce the possibility of dose and collect the offline dose measurement results to create a temporal profile for the absorbed dose measurements.…”

Stability and efficiency of a CMOS sensor as detector of low energy β and γ particles

“…The sensitive layer below pixel surface has a thickness of some micrometers, similar to the size of the pixel. Beside imaging applications, new perspectives in various research areas could be opened by this class of devices: as an example, CMOS Image Sensors have already been tested as ionising radiation detectors for medical applications [13][14][15]. This type of sensors has an APS (Active Pixel Sensor) architecture, where each pixel hosts a photodiode and some transistors to implement the electronic front-end part.…”