A stochastic agent-based extension of the GSM2 model for particle therapy: cell-cycle dynamics, dose-rate dependence, and fractionation effects

TL;DR

This paper presents a stochastic agent-based model extending GSM2 to simulate cellular responses to particle therapy, capturing damage, repair, and cell-cycle dynamics across scales.

Contribution

The novel framework explicitly models single-cell responses to radiation, integrating stochastic damage, repair, and cell-cycle progression within a scalable agent-based approach.

Findings

Reproduces dose-rate dependence of cell survival.

Captures high LET attenuation of biological effects.

Models inverse dose rate effect in split-dose irradiation.

Abstract

Accurately linking microscopic energy deposition from ionizing radiation to emergent biological outcomes remains a central challenge in radiobiological modelling, particularly when stochastic damage induction, cell-cycle dynamics, and spatial organisation within irradiated tissues must be treated explicitly and consistently across scales. To address this, we introduce a stochastic agent-based radiobiological modelling framework for simulating biological response to particle irradiation, developed as an explicit single-cell extension of the Generalized Stochastic Microdosimetric Model (GSM2). Each cell is represented as an autonomous agent whose internal state, including DNA lesion counts, cell-cycle phase, and oxygenation level, evolves according to a continuous-time Markov chain driven by GSM2 transition rates. Radiation-induced damage induction, repair, misrepair, cell-cycle progression, proliferation, and migration are treated as competing stochastic events resolved through a next-event, event-driven algorithm, which provides computationally efficient scaling with system size while preserving full single-cell resolution. The framework is applied to three-dimensional tumour spheroids irradiated with 1H and 12C ions across a range of energies and dose rates. We characterise the spatiotemporal evolution of cell-cycle phase composition and spheroid volume following irradiation, and examine the dependence of cell survival on dose rate over four orders of magnitude. Several empirically established trends in biological response, including the dose-rate dependence of cell survival, its attenuation at high LET, and the inverse dose rate effect in split-dose irradiation, emerge from the model through the explicit coupling of particle arrivals, damage accumulation, and repair kinetics, without recourse to empirical correction factors as typically done.