Dose conversion and wall correction factors for Fricke dosimetry in high-energy photon beams: analytical model and Monte Carlo calculations.

This paper presents the dose conversion and wall correction factors for Fricke dosimetry in high-energy photon beams calculated using both an analytical general cavity model and Monte Carlo techniques. The conversion factor is calculated as the ratio of the absorbed dose in water to that in the Fricke dosimeter solution with a water-walled vessel. The wall correction factor accounts for the change in the absorbed dose to the dosimeter solution caused by the inhomogeneous dosimeter wall material. A usercode based on the EGS4 Monte Carlo system, with the application of a correlated sampling variance reduction technique, has been employed in the calculations of these factors and the parameters used in the cavity model. Good agreement has been achieved between the predictions of the model and that obtained by direct Monte Carlo simulation and also with other workers' experiments. It is shown that Fricke dosimeters in common use cannot be considered to be 'large' detectors and therefore 'general cavity theory' should be applied in converting the dose to water. It is confirmed that plastic dosimeter vessels have a negligible wall effect. The wall correction factor for a 1 mm thick Pyrex-walled vessel varies with incident photon energy from 1.001 +/- 0.001 for a 60Co beam to 0.983 +/- 0.001 for a 24 MV (TPR(10)20 = 0.80) photon beam. This implies that previous Fricke measurements with glass-walled vessels should be re-evaluated.