Nanoparticle-Mediated Dose Enhancement in Radiotherapy: A Reproducible Workflow to Jointly Quantify DEF and SER
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23851/nmi.2026.2.1.19Keywords:
Gold nanoparticles, TiO2, dose enhancement factor, sensitizer enhancement ratio, reproducible protocolAbstract
There has been growing interest in the use of nanoparticles to radiosensitise tumours, as this technique has the potential to maximise the radiation dose delivered within a tumour while minimising the dose delivered to surrounding healthy tissue. In this context, this study provides a reproducible methodology to evaluate the dose enhancement factor (DEF) and the sensitizer enhancement ratio (SER) simultaneously under clinical photon-beam conditions. The methodology combines reference dose measurements with an ionisation chamber, dose mapping with Gafchromic EBT3 films, region-of-interest (ROI) analysis, radiotherapy dose-data processing using the DICOM RTDose standard, uncertainty estimation, and linear-quadratic modelling of cell survival. This integration provides a structured and standardised framework for comparable reporting of physical and biological enhancement indices across different studies. Instead of presenting the experimental dataset as a novel biological validation, it was analysed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed methodology. The obtained results showed that gold nanoparticles produced DEF values of 1.35 at 120 kVp and 1.05 at 6 MV, whereas titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanoparticles produced corresponding values of 1.15 and 1.03, respectively. The calculated SER values were 1.20 and 1.10 for gold and TiO2 nanoparticles, respectively, at a cell-survival level of 0.1 under the studied conditions. Overall, the proposed workflow provides a clear and transparent platform for standardising reports of nanoparticle-mediated radiotherapy enhancement, enabling replication and comparison in future studies.
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