A management system for thermoluminescence dosimetry

The advantages of LiF-TL dosimetry for clinical dosimetry like small size, water equivalence, independence of electron energy etc. are unfortunately accompanied by some drawbacks like individual calibration factors, their time dependence etc. These drawbacks make LiF-TL dosimetry somewhat inconvenient for routine dosimetry, if it is not handled properly. In order to overcome these problems, the authors developed a "TLD management system" on the basis of the developing environment NeXT Step under UNIX. The system consists of: data acquisition; graphically controlled glow curve deconvolution; standard evaluation with protocol; statistical evaluation of calibration measurements; overlaying glow curves for comparison.