Practical biological spread-out Bragg peak design of carbon beam

TL;DR

This paper presents a practical method for designing biological spread-out Bragg peaks (SOBP) for carbon ion beams in radiation therapy, utilizing the LQ model and Monte Carlo simulations to optimize dose uniformity.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach combining the LQ model with Monte Carlo simulations to design biological SOBP for carbon beams, achieving improved dose uniformity.

Findings

Biological SOBP uniformity achieved at 1.34%.

Method effectively integrates physical dose and biological effects.

Applicable for optimizing carbon beam therapy plans.

Abstract

The carbon beams show more advantages on the biological properties compared with proton beams in radiation therapy. The carbon beam shows high linear energy transfer (LET) to medium and it increases the relative biological effectiveness (RBE). To design spread-out Bragg peak (SOBP) of biological dose using carbon beam, a practical method was purposed by using the linear-quadratic (LQ) model and Geant4 based Monte Carlo simulation code. The various Bragg peak profiles and LET was calculated for each slice at the target region. To generate appropriate biological SOBP, a set of weighting factor, which is a power function in terms of energy step, was applied to the obtained each physical dose. The designed biological SOBP showed 1.34 % of uniformity.