Modelling Energy Dependence of Liquid Ionisation Chambers Using Fluence Pencil Kernels

Abstract: The high demand on accuracy in radiotherapy is to a large extent ensured through measurements of dose to water. The liquid ionisation chamber (LIC) is a type of detector that has several desirable properties for such measurements, e.g. a small active volume and minimal directional dependent response. There are, however, still gaps in knowledge concerning fundamental characteristics of this kind of detector. One of these characteristics is the detector’s response variation in relation to water with varying beam quality. This work aims to increase the knowledge of the LIC’s behaviour and attempts to come up with a method to construct correction factors for the response variation. The response model proposed by Eklund and Ahnesjö [2009] has been evaluated for two LICs, one filled with isooctane and the other with tetramethylsilane (TMS). The evaluation was done for two photon beams, 6 and 15 MV. It was found that the energy dependent response calculations from this method could not explain the difference between the LIC and reference air-filled ionisation chamber measurements in the larger fields. The response model leads to corrections for the TMS filled LIC in the direction away from the reference measurements. For the LIC filled with isooctane the corrections points towards the reference but were too small to completely explain the difference.