A novel radioguided surgery technique exploiting β^- decays

The background induced by the high penetration power of the γ radiation is the main limiting factor of the current radio-guided surgery (RGS). To partially mitigate it, a RGS with β⁺ -emitting radio-tracers has been suggested in literature. Here we propose the use of β^- -emitting radio-tracers and β^- 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 probes and could extend RGS to tumours for which background originating from nearby healthy tissue makes γ probes less effective. We developed a β^- 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.