A novel radioguided surgery technique exploiting beta(-) decays

The background induced by the high penetration power of the gamma radiation is the main limiting factor of the current radio-guided surgery (RGS). To partially mitigate it, a RGS with beta(+)-emitting radio-tracers has been suggested in literature. Here we propose the use of beta(-)-emitting radio-tracers and beta(-) probes and discuss the advantage of this method with respect to the previously explored ones: the electron low penetration power allows for simple and versatile gamma probes and could extend RGS to tumours for which background originating from nearby healthy tissue makes probes less effective. We developed a beta(-) probe prototype and studied its performances on phantoms. By means of a detailed simulation we have also extrapolated the results to estimate the performances in a realistic case of meningioma, pathology which is going to be our first in-vivo test case. A good sensitivity to residuals down to 0.1 ml can be reached within 1 s with an administered activity smaller than those for PET-scans thus making the radiation exposure to medical personnel negligible.