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Title: Validation of Geant4 fragmentation for Heavy Ion Therapy

Journal Article · · Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. Section A, Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment
 [1];  [2];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [5];  [6];  [7];  [2];  [8];  [1];  [1]
  1. Univ. of Wollongong (Australia)
  2. INFN, Catania (Italy)
  3. European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva (Switzerland)
  4. CNRS/IN2P3 (France); Univ. Bordeaux (France)
  5. European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), Geneva (Switzerland); Tomsk State Univ., Tomsk (Russia)
  6. SLAC National Accelerator Lab., Menlo Park, CA (United States)
  7. French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), Saclay (France)
  8. INFN, Catania (Italy); National Physical Lab., Middlesex (United Kingdom)
+ Show Author Affiliations

12C ion therapy has had growing interest in recent years for its excellent dose conformity. However at therapeutic energies, which can be as high as 400 MeV/u, carbon ions produce secondary fragments. For an incident 400 MeV/u 12C ion beam, ~70% of the beam will undergo fragmentation before the Bragg Peak. The dosimetric and radiobiological impact of these fragments must be accurately characterised, as it can result in increasing the risk of secondary cancer for the patient as well as altering the relative biological effectiveness. Here, this work investigates the accuracy of three different nuclear fragmentation models available in the Monte Carlo Toolkit Geant4, the Binary Intranuclear Cascade (BIC), the Quantum Molecular Dynamics (QMD) and the Liege Intranuclear Cascade (INCL++). The models were benchmarked against experimental data for a pristine 400 MeV/u 12C beam incident upon a water phantom, including fragment yield, angular and energy distribution. For fragment yields the three alternative models agreed between ~5 and ~35% with experimental measurements, the QMD using the “Frag” option gave the best agreement for lighter fragments but had reduced agreement for larger fragments. For angular distributions INCL++ was seen to provide the best agreement among the models for all elements with the exception of Hydrogen, while BIC and QMD was seen to produce broader distributions compared to experiment. BIC and QMD performed similar to one another for kinetic energy distributions while INCL++ suffered from producing lower energy distributions compared to the other models and experiment.

Research Organization:
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC), Menlo Park, CA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Grant/Contract Number:
AC02-76SF00515
OSTI ID:
1408204
Journal Information:
Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research. Section A, Accelerators, Spectrometers, Detectors and Associated Equipment, Vol. 869, Issue C; ISSN 0168-9002
Publisher:
ElsevierCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 26 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

References (13)

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Experimental study of nuclear fragmentation of 200 and 400 MeV/ u 12 C ions in water for applications in particle therapy journal November 2013
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Correction factors to convert microdosimetry measurements in silicon to tissue in 12 C ion therapy journal February 2017
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Geant4—a simulation toolkit
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journal July 2003
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journal November 2016
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Carbon fragmentation measurements and validation of the Geant4 nuclear reaction models for hadrontherapy journal November 2012
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Geant4 models for simulation of multiple scattering journal April 2010
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Cited By (4)

Optimisation of the design of SOI microdosimeters for hadron therapy quality assurance journal October 2018
The impact of secondary fragments on the image quality of helium ion imaging journal October 2018
Comparative study of alternative Geant4 hadronic ion inelastic physics models for prediction of positron-emitting radionuclide production in carbon and oxygen ion therapy journal August 2019
The impact of sensitive volume thickness for silicon on insulator microdosimeters in hadron therapy journal January 2020

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46 INSTRUMENTATION RELATED TO NUCLEAR SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Geant4
Benchmarking
Heavy ion therapy