Simulation study of dose enhancement in a cell due to nearby carbon and oxygen in particle radiotherapy

TL;DR

This simulation study investigates how carbon and oxygen compositions can enhance radiation dose deposition in cells during particle therapy, showing they outperform gold and gadolinium in effectiveness.

Contribution

It demonstrates that carbon and oxygen can significantly improve dose enhancement in cellular models, highlighting their potential as effective tools in particle radiotherapy.

Findings

Carbon and oxygen induce greater dose enhancement than gold and gadolinium.

Dose enhancement is more effective in the nucleus when compositions are uniformly distributed.

High-stopping-power materials like carbon nanotubes are promising for dose enhancement.

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the dose-deposition enhancement by alpha-particle irradiation in a cellular model using carbon and oxygen chemical compositions.A simulation study was performed to study dose enhancement due to carbon and oxygen for a human cell where Geant4 code used for the alpha-particle irradiation to the cellular phantom. The characteristic of dose enhancement in the nucleus and cytoplasm by the alpha-particle radiation was investigated based on concentrations of the carbon and oxygen compositions and was compared with those by gold and gadolinium.The results show that both the carbon and oxygen-induced dose enhancement was found to be more effective than those of gold and gadolinium. We found that the dose-enhancement effect was more dominant in the nucleus than in the cytoplasm if carbon or oxygen is uniformly distributed in a whole cell. In the condition that the added chemical composition was inserted only into the cytoplasm, the effect of the dose enhancement in nucleus becomes weak.We showed that high-stopping-power materials offer a more effective dose-enhancement efficacy and suggest that the carbon nanotubes and oxygenation are promising candidates for dose utilization as dose enhancement tools in particle therapy.