Advances in the autoradiography technique for Boron-10 quantification in bone

Boron neutron capture therapy research is influenced by the latest advances in science and technology, which promote the increase of clinical scenarios that can be treated with this chemically targeted form of radiotherapy. One of those is osteosarcoma, an invasive limb tumor that is being investigated for clinical BNCT by several research groups worldwide. One of the difficulties to study hard tissues for BNCT is the measurement of the boron concentration using nuclear techniques. Nuclear techniques commonly used to determine the boron concentration in soft tissue such as neutron autoradiography, require a calibration curve able to relate the boron concentration in the sample with the track density on the nuclear track detector. The construction of a calibration curve involves generating samples with known amount of boron. These standards must have a structure similar to the sample to be measured and ensure a homogeneous distribution of generated tracks on the detector. In the case of hard tissue this is not a trivial task.